When the Old Gods Join the Army

Deborah Falaye, Blood Scion

Fifteen-year-old Sloane just received her draft notice; she’s now a Recruit in the brutal occupying Lucis army. But it’s worse than just being a child soldier. She’s a Scion, a descendant of the Orisha, the old gods of the conquered Yoruba nation. Sloan faces the double challenge of surviving a particularly brutal boot camp while maintaining her secret, because if the Lucis rulers discover her magic powers, her life would be forfeit.

Debut novelist Deborah Falaye clearly means this novel to enter the same YA science fantasy niche as the Hunger Games and Divergent franchises. She has a similar premise, with a bloated state and a protagonist whose life is circumscribed by violence. Falaye’s story really emphasizes the degrading effects of settler colonialism. But the longer her story continues, the more conscious I become of the movies and other sources she’s plundered for her story.

The story starts well. Sloane is an intrepid youth, orphaned early when the Lucis disappeared her parents. By day, she combs the surrounding foothills for evidence of her mother’s whereabouts; by night, she evades the Nightwalkers, a vicious secret police squad. She survives by wits, ingenuity, and judicious application of her Scion magic. But her powers must never be discovered; state propaganda has made turning Scions over a lucrative business.

Almost immediately, though, the story changes. Sloane receives her draft letter and, knowing that escape is impossible, submits. Boot camp is a relentless liturgy of humiliation and loss, a combination of constant speeches and impossible physical tests. Though an accomplished street brawler at home, Sloane’s skills don’t translate into military applications. She struggles to adapt, plagued constantly with shame and self-recrimination.

That’s where Falaye’s movie influences become obvious. The ritual of humiliating the poor recruit is beloved of countless military movies; think Gunny Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. Sloan’s battalion commander is frequently given to passionate speeches reminiscent of George C. Scott’s iconic performance in Patton. Meanwhile, Sloane descends into a semi-delusional fugue reminiscent of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Deborah Falaye

Moreover, the camp described couldn’t possibly work. Her commanders expect Sloane to perform feats of military precision that nobody could ever do as described. Somehow, Sloane is the only recruit unable to accurately handle and fire an assault rifle the first time they’ve ever touched one, notwithstanding that private firearms are unlawful in the Lucis empire. Likewise, only Sloane fails to scale a rope bridge without a harness the first time.

But even beyond that, the organization wouldn’t work. Sloane’s commanders encourage recruits to fear, distrust, and conspire against one another. Before boot camp, every recruit is required to kill one civilian from their home life; if they refuse, they’ll be killed, and the army will kill their loved ones anyway. On day one, they order her squad to collectively select and kill one recruit, to prove their dedication to the occupying army they were all drafted into.

That’s not how this works. Anybody who’s attended boot camp knows they isolate recruits from home and family. Jody calls and withholding personal mail reinforce the precept that you can only trust your fellow soldiers. But you have to trust your fellow soldiers to have your back, not have you in their crosshairs. And killing loved ones is the recruitment tactic of terrorist organizations like the LRA, not state militaries that have occupied territory for three centuries.

Falaye describes the Nightwalkers using divide-and-conquer tactics familiar from the Stasi, the Tonton Macoutes, and COINTELPRO. But those tactics work against civilian populations. Militaries, including occupying foreign militaries like Falaye describes, have to have operational unity to hold the divided population. Yet Falaye describes Sloane being given an assault rifle and conducting a smash-and-grab raid on the third day of training.

Maybe I’m the problem. Falaye writes for audiences much younger than me, audiences that haven’t watched as many war movies and therefore won’t recognize the stereotypes she recycles. Maybe somebody younger, somebody untainted by experience with popular culture, would receive Falaye’s story with unclouded eyes that I no longer have. But surely anybody would recognize that the military she describes couldn’t possibly work.

Judging by the early pages, I suspect this story might’ve succeeded had Falaye not included the military. Had Sloane remained an outsider, her adversarial position might’ve worked. I wanted to enjoy Falaye’s fable of resurgent old religion versus the bootheel of empire. But around halfway through, I realized I was avoiding the book. It had too many stacked implausibilities. I like Falaye’s premise, but her performance doesn’t work.

The Adam Project and the Price of Morality

Late in the Netflix movie The Adam Project, time-traveling kleptocrat Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener) storms into a glass-walled executive suite and quarrels with her younger self. “All of it!” screams young Sorian. “It’s unethical!”

“And illegal,” older, slicker, hard-bitten Sorian replies.

“The environmental impact alone… could be devastating,” says young Sorian.

“Well in fairness to us, the environment was pretty much toast before we came along.”

The Adam Project is only the latest movie using science fiction stereotypes as metaphors for the various ways industrialized Western civilization threatens human existence. From The Terminator’s nuclear bombs, to Gattaca’s genetically modified castes to Don’t Look Up’s imminent comet, Hollywood loves imagining ways humanity is about to destroy itself. The Adam Project, however, uniquely focuses on just one aspect: humanity’s looming destruction is caused by individuals.

Usually, Hollywood hides the causes diplomatically. The Terminator and The Matrix say humanity’s enemy is machines it started, and can’t control. Don’t Look Up and Children of Men attribute humanity’s looming extinction to forces of nature, as absent of purpose as rain. Even when humans directly cause our own destruction, as in Planet of the Apes or Wall-E, the destruction happens offscreen, the product of impersonal economic or government forces.

By contrast, The Adam Project gives humanity’s nemesis a name and face. Maya Sorian has money and power but, as we discover in the scene where she scolds herself, little else. Her only mission is to expand that money and power. She knows the consequences, very specifically, since she’s a time traveler; the devastation her business dealings cause isn’t hypothetical, she’s seen it herself. Yet the profit motive conquers all.

How we attribute responsibility matters. Ecofascist twaddle has produced slogans like “Maybe humanity is the virus” or “Mankind just needs a good cull,” slogans which advocate eliminating huge swaths of humanity. Those swaths are always poor, and usually non-White. Though this position wears the moral trappings of ecological stewardship, it’s every bit as specious as claiming that we’ll save our national identity by building the wall or killing the Jews.

In reality, hydrocarbon companies have known since at least 1977 that they were causing global warming. Manufacturers discharge synthetic chemicals known to ruin human health into municipal sewer systems, then the treated sewage gets used as fertilizer, ruining the soil forever. Fossil fuel companies countered the news that they were the largest water polluters by lobbying the federal government for further deregulation. “Humanity” isn’t killing the earth; lawless capitalists are.

Ryan Reynolds (left), Mark Ruffalo, and Walker Scobell in The Adam Project

Superficially, The Adam Project is an action comedy. The movie runs on cartoon-like fight sequences pilfered from Star Wars and Marvel movies. Much of the movie’s appeal derives from Ryan Reynolds’ celebrated ability to banter with runaway train urgency. Like The Terminator, which addressed similar themes of existential anomie, it’s possible to enjoy The Adam Project on the surface level, and have fun.

The underlying conflict isn’t between Sorian and Adam (Reynolds), or even adult Adam and his preteen self (Walker Scobell). The conflict is between Sorian’s and Adam’s ethical models. Sorian, like the hydrocarbon and chemical companies ruining our environment, is motivated by profit. She enjoys concentrated benefits, while offloading the related costs onto humanity at large; her rewards are large enough that she doesn’t have to care who she hurts.

Adam, by contrast, has concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. We watch him suffer repeated losses: his mother, then his wife, then his father. As a time traveler, moreover, we recognize that he’s suffering these losses again, and will probably continue doing so. Indeed, if Adam wins and humanity reaps the benefits of his victory, Adam will pay the final price: wiping his personal timeline from existence.

The parallels are inescapable. Sorian is Nietzschean and morally blank, unconcerned by others, measuring victory only by acquisition of power. Adam, by contrast, is almost messianic, as his actions are driven by transcendent truths, and saving humanity will cost him everything. Amorality has brought Sorian great reward, while Adam’s morality will incur great cost, but Sorian acknowledges she’s destroying the human race, while Adam wants to save humanity.

Mercifully, most of us won’t get erased from history standing up to the money hoarders currently destroying the planet. We will, however, face the cost-benefit choice. Doing right often means incurring great personal cost, for rewards that gather for humanity overall. That can be hard, when amoral malefactors hoard rewards; that’s why evildoers like Sorian have minions. Sometimes, it helps to remember that evil isn’t impersonal; evildoers have faces and names.

And the Truth Shall Set You

Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

Austin Channing Brown wants White people to understand what it takes to survive a day in her skin. She wants us to think about how our unspoken assumptions narrow her choices, how our demands for understanding impinge upon her freedom. For her, this isn’t an academic exercise in statistics and probabilities. As a Black woman working in White spaces, the implications of Whiteness are a challenge she faces daily.

Brown uses her own autobiography, as a career activist in a Christian outreach ministry, to commence her story. In this, Brown’s story overlaps thematically with other activists I’ve read recently, including Danté Stewart and Ibram Kendi. However, Brown places the autobiographical content front and center: her writing is deeply positional. By that I mean this isn’t everyone’s story, it’s Brown’s, coming from her position as both Black and a woman.

From this position, she identifies patterns in her life starting with individual incidents. Her childhood, in a primarily White Christian school, where her teachers’ “colorblind” optimism clashes with students who harbor, and speak, profound hatred. Her multifaceted religious upbringing, and the collision between White and Black expressions of Christianity. Her professional activism career, as frequently the only Black person in overwhelmingly White spaces.

As Brown’s story unfolds, patterns become clear: White people make her responsible for their feelings. When confronted with the atrocities which racism has wrought, White people come blubbering to her, begging for absolution. When racism’s lingering presence threatens White people’s sense of self, White people lash out, expecting her to absorb their anger. Whatever happens, Brown finds herself constantly managing White people’s feelings.

Brown’s memoir of interactions with White people and Whiteness includes events that are sometimes frightening, but most often heart-wrenching. From well-meaning people coming to grips with their own inherited privilege and unexamined prejudices, to others refusing to come to grips and instead displacing their feelings into rage, Brown conveys the feelings which others bring to her. The problem is, managing others’ feelings shouldn’t be her responsibility.

Austin Channing Brown

Throughout her narrative, Brown’s Christianity informs her story. She describes how, in attending her first minority-Black church, she discovered an ethic of service and celebration that motivated her subsequent life— an ethic sadly missing in many majority-White congregations. (I can relate.) Her willingness to serve, and to reach across racial lines to build consensus in workplaces, schools, and other public places, comes explicitly from her Christianity.

This Christian ethic has limits, however. At what point does Brown get to stop maintaining others’ feelings? When White people react adversely to being challenged on America’s existing system, when is she allowed to refuse the battle? She recounts her story with a mix of emotions: great love for those who need her guidance, but also great fatigue at having to repeat the same battles ceaselessly. Surely God respects her weariness.

It’s difficult to synopsize this book without short-changing Brown’s story. Though the book is itself short for its genre, under 200 pages, she leads her readers through enough changes that the book feels epic, without feeling long. She moves from intimate recounting of her own story, to broader themes, and back again with ease. This is Brown’s personal story, but she emphasizes, it’s also the story of millions of Black Americans daily.

I read widely about race in America today. Stories like Brown’s aren’t new to me. Yet she makes clear something that’s percolated silently in my brain, without previously finding expression: that despite whatever progress we’ve made, our system still sees Whiteness (and, less explicitly, maleness) as America’s default position. People like me might sympathize mightily with Brown’s story, but the system allows us to forget. Brown doesn’t have that freedom.

Like Stewart or Kendi, Brown writes not only to convey her life lessons, but to present those lessons in one place, permanently. Instead of having to teach the same lessons time after time, she can present her book. And it’s important for us readers, too: though Brown says little I haven’t read in other writers, it’s good to hear it again. Because though I already believe her, I also have the privilege of occasionally forgetting.

Brown’s story is brief without being scanty, and personal but not sentimental. We can read her memoir with an open heart, or give copies to our loved ones who need to understand what “the system” means. Her Christian thread also makes her book valuable in churches, a space nominally dedicated to liberation, though we often lose sight. She takes us on an important, necessary journey.

The Truth, the State, and Store-Bought Justice

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 46
Michael Apted (director), Gorky Park

Three corpses lie buried in snow in Moscow’s most popular amusement park. Evidence suggests they were shot in broad daylight, two of them more than once, yet somehow nobody noticed. Then, when a curious KGB officer with no regard for procedure partially uncovers them, they reveal their most grisly sacred: the bodies have been mutilated, their faces and fingertips flensed. No way of knowing who they were.

The film noir tradition has its history in places of moral degradation and political malaise: Vichy France, London’s dockyards, McCarthyite America. Working from a novel by Martin Cruz Smith, director Michael Apted applies the same principles to Soviet Moscow. Apted leads us through a world where politicians love ideology but don’t live by it, where money greases the Cold War’s wheels, and evidence doesn’t determine truth, the state does.

Chief Inspector Arkady Renko (William Hurt) tries to unload the Gorky Park murders onto the KGB, not because he believes the murders are political, but because the KGB so clearly doesn’t want them. He’s accustomed to turf battles with state enforcement, so the state’s hasty acquiescence worries him. Especially when the autopsy reveals that at least one anonymous corpse belongs to an American national, an oddity in Soviet Russia.

Despite the Soviet Union’s society nominally being undivided by class, Renko is something of Moscow aristocracy. His superiors repeatedly name-check his father, a war hero, which probably explains why he outranks officers significantly older than him. Renko has, however, chosen a career in the Militsiya, the nationalized Soviet civilian police force, a dimly regarded profession for a member of the nomenklatura. This causes suspicion among an already distrustful bureaucratic hierarchy.

That same hierarchy quickly introduces Renko to Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin), an American importer. Osborne wears slick suits, seems chummy with Moscow’s swells, and sleeps with much younger Russian women. When Osborne starts asking pointed questions about Renko’s investigation, Renko starts suspecting Osborne’s motivations. It seems Moscow’s chief prosecutor might share those suspicions, and urges Renko to investigate further.

Martin Cruz Smith wrote the original novel after spending several weeks in Moscow in the late 1970s. His book, and Apted’s subsequent movie, were condemned as anti-Soviet propaganda, and banned by the pre-Glasnost state. However, in fairness, Smith’s American characters hardly emerge smelling like roses. When Jack Osborne transparently bribes Soviet officials, those officials buy in hastily, making Osborne complicit in state-based suppression of facts.

Lee Marvin (left) and William Hurt at the big reveal of Gorky Park

Besides Osborne, another American begins probing the investigation. William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy) lurks around the crime scene’s periphery, but when Renko approaches, Kirwill rabbit-punches him and runs. Renko, his curiosity piqued, searches Kirwill’s hotel room, where he finds a gold-plated badge. Seems Kirwill, like Renko, is a homicide detective, NYPD. Renko quickly reminds Kirwill this isn’t his patch, and confiscates the badge.

Throughout the movie, the Moscow nomenklatura remind one another that Renko is one of Russia’s best homicide investigators. Quickly, however, we discover what “best” means. He casually lies to informants, threatens witnesses, and carries an unregistered sidearm. Despite showing no ambition to rise in the Soviet state, a tendency which worries his power-hungry superiors, Renko mixes a strong belief in justice, with a casual disregard for procedure and tedium.

Renko’s attitude arises from his circumstances. He learned early that powerful people manipulate rules, that the state’s ideological rigidity doesn’t translate into honesty. The same Soviet enforcers who censor media and redistribute private property, maintain a background life of lavish parties and under-the-table financial dealings. They attempt to break up the back-alley black market economy, while maintaining the exact same practices in their gilded offices and lavish country dachas.

Apted’s physical design emphasizes the movie’s moral themes. His Moscow (mostly shot in Helsinki, Finland) is constantly saturated with light. This illumination doesn’t make anything clearer, though: reflected off concrete buildings and mounded snow, Moscow’s constant sunlight is more blinding than enlightening. William Hurt squints into this overlit streetscape with the intensity of a man who loves and defends his people, but has clearly come to hate his city.

In some ways, this movie is distinctly dated. Its Reagan-era anti-Soviet propaganda, backed with James Horner’s melodramatic score, clearly belongs to the early 1980s. But in other ways, with its intrusive government that dictates policy, and its police who guard order without underlying principles of justice, this movie clearly describes our present. It’s easy to see ourselves, and the authorities who dictate our lives, portrayed in this film.

Because really, in forty years, neither post-Soviet Russia nor America has learned very much.

Magic Riders on the Underground Railroad

Nicole Glover, The Conductors

Hetty Rhodes didn’t smuggle dozens of escaping slaves to freedom in Philadelphia during the Civil War, just to watch them get murdered. But that’s exactly what’s happening. During the precarious Reconstruction years, White police have little interest in violence perpetrated in Philadelphia’s Black community. So Hetty and her husband Benjy take it on themselves to investigate, armed only with ingenuity and a little carefully chosen magic.

Nicole Glover’s debut novel channels multiple well-loved writers in the crime, historical fiction, and fantasy genres. But Glover also establishes her own voice based on her characters’ precarious economic and social positions. She writes from a position simultaneously outsider, kept down by institutional barriers and stark, unquestioned racism, but also insider, as her characters establish their own community in the shadow of White dominion.

The first body shocks everyone. Charlie Richardson, an escaped slave like Hetty and Benjy, parlayed his natural wits, and limited moral reserves, into a local fortune, but made enemies along the way. Because the community doesn’t trust lawmen, witnesses turn to Hetty, whose experience on the Underground Railroad has made her a local legend. But when Hetty begins investigating, she discovers a cursed mark carved into Charlie’s flesh.

Before long, Hetty’s astrology-based wizardry begins finding traces of magic strewn across Philadelphia. Hetty is an unusually skillful spellcaster, but in a city where magic is an artisanal skill, sold from street-corner stalls, her celestial powers get lost in a cacophony of evidence and rumor. Then the second body appears, suspiciously close to Hetty and Benjy’s door. Seems the killer’s motives are personal, and the Rhodes family themselves are targets.

Because of how books are marketed, Glover’s story will draw comparisons to writers like Laurel K. Hamilton and Jim Butcher, fantasy novelists whose supernatural elements heighten their gritty, crime-strewn urban settings. But reading Glover, my mind drifted to Walter Mosley. Both authors feature characters transplanted from their home communities, into segregated cities that prove to be anything but promised lands. Both address how cities create, and enforce, racial boundaries.

Nicole Glover

And both, in differing ways, deal with how law often functions as an impediment to order. Hetty and Benjy Rhodes, like Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, investigate crimes which law enforcement openly disregards. They accept penny-ante payments for their inquiries, and have to maintain day jobs among the suspects they’re investigating. They do this because, if the community doesn’t enforce ethics and punish wrongdoers, nobody will. Their neighborhood has to govern itself.

The Reconstruction-era setting emphasizes Glover’s themes of division and community. With the Civil War over, America has forgotten its pledges to Black citizens, who live marginally. Though key plot points turn on a local Black political machine, it’s dominated by men (specifically men) desperate to be seen as reputable by White Philadelphians. Notably, Black wizards aren’t allowed to own wands, just as freed Blacks weren’t allowed to own guns.

Magic, in Glover’s telling, isn’t a preternatural workaround for difficult situations, a way to suspend physics. Instead, it’s a skill, and a common one: every storekeeper and housewife has a few spells handy, just in case. Hetty is remarkably skilled at “Celestial Magic,” but so is the murderer. She uses magic like James Bond uses his famous gadgets, a handy way to escape momentary problems, but ultimately a tool.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I felt deeply invested in Glover’s atmospheric storytelling. For her, magical Philadelphia isn’t a background; she immerses readers in an intricately realized environment. An important side point in Glover’s novel is that Hetty is a renowned storyteller, who spins elaborate yarns of her Civil War adventures spontaneously for eager listeners. This lampshades the parts of storytelling that clearly interest Glover most.

But don’t overlook the mystery aspect of Glover’s storytelling, either. The murders, which start out with only a handful of loosely spaced clues, become more tangled as the investigation progresses. Hetty and Benjy have to pursue evidence without official help, even as the killer clearly aims at them. As a veteran mystery reader, I started a suspect list and tested it against the mounting evidence. But even I was wrong.

Glover’s writing hooks you early and keeps you engaged. Her style is familiar enough to genre readers that it won’t jar anybody, or probably change anybody’s understanding of the genres; but she uses readers’ expectations as a foundation to build on, not as a hammock. Her writing is familiar, but not passive. Even as I recognized the influences that shaped Glover’s voice, she never stopped finding ways to surprise me.

Jesus and the Talmudic Tradition

Amy-Jill Levine, The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner's Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings

Conservative or progressive, believers or unbelievers, we like to believe the teachings of Jesus are straightforward and clear. We love choosing favorite passages, brandishing them like torches, and claiming: “See? Everyone knows what these words mean, so stop arguing!” So how do we handle those passages where Jesus seems to contradict his usual teachings? The places where Jesus sometimes seems authoritarian, combative, or downright nasty?

Despite being Orthodox Jewish herself, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine has spent her career mostly at Christian seminaries, teaching the faith’s aspiring young leaders about Christianity’s Jewish roots. She has explicated the teachings of Jesus and Paul, both of whom considered themselves lifelong Jews, to a generation that has forgotten Hebrew idiom. And part of that idiom is: Scripture is something we live with, not something we mine for sound bites.

Professor Levine identifies six Gospel passages where Jesus makes statements which theologians have wrestled with for centuries. She organizes them in ascending order of difficulty, starting with the Rich Young Ruler, whom Jesus told he would only achieve salvation by selling everything he owned. She rises through Jesus calling followers to apparently hate their families, live like slaves, and fear eternal condemnation, finishing on a passage where Jesus appears shockingly antisemitic.

In all cases, Dr. Levine avoids the popular Protestant desire to provide pat answers. She seeks to situate Jesus’ words in historical and scriptural context, including not only the Hebrew Scriptures which Christians call the Old Testament, but also the Pseudepigrapha (Apocrypha), Talmud, and Mishnah. Though dealing with Christian teachings, her approach is steadfastly Jewish, based on debate, testing, and acknowledging the limitations of human understanding.

Christians, and unbelievers coming from a culturally Christian background, have a history of using Scripture to stop debate. “The Bible says this,” we proclaim, sometimes literally waving our Bibles, “so stop arguing.” This authoritarian tradition has resulted in important issues of the relationship between persons and power being subsumed by anger and pettiness, as both sides wonder why the other can’t understand what seems so unable to grasp the obvious.

Amy-Jill Levine

Jewish tradition works differently. “The Bible says this,” they say, sometimes while literally spreading the book open on the lectern, “what does that mean?” The entire Talmudic tradition consists of recognized scholars struggling to understand what Biblical passages, sometimes made opaque through passing ages, mean for us today. In other words, Christians use the Bible to stop debate, while Jews historically use the Bible to commence debate.

Levine takes this latter approach. Her chapters parse Jesus’ parallels with Jewish Scripture, study the Gospels’ Greek vocabulary and its Hebrew equivalents, consider what was happening in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time, and eventually find a resting place, if not a resolution. Levine emphasizes that these are her conclusions, not absolute solutions to difficult passages. However, she invites readers to continue the debates with the best evidence they can find.

As an aside, this approach isn't always flawless. Memorist Shulem Deen describes years spent teaching young Jews the Talmudic tradition, often at the expense of math, science, and the humanities. No tradition is one-size-fits-all, and when the debate becomes more important than the action, maybe it’s time to reëvaluate our choices. However, going to the other extreme and eliminating all debate hasn’t worked so well, either.

On balance, Levine hasn’t resolved the conundrums found in Jesus’ difficult teachings. In applying the Jewish dialectic tradition, she leaves behind Christians conditioned to seek a resounding final answer, which they expect to hear proclaimed authoritatively by a (usually male) figure at a lectern. In academic terms, many Christians want a lecture, not a seminar. The Jewish love of questions doesn’t embrace the culturally Christian demand for answers.

Further, Levine’s secondary title promises “A Beginner’s Guide,” and that’s what we get. Her chapters are sized right for weekly Bible study lessons (an accompanying DVD and leader’s guide are available). Which is fine, for what it is. But she doesn’t cite sources, offer further readings, or otherwise prepare for anybody to move beyond the beginner’s level. I sometimes lament Protestantism’s lacuna between novice-level studies and postgraduate seminary.

Notwithstanding these quibbles, I really appreciate this book. Levine attempts to coach willing Christians to rediscover their faith’s Jewish dialectical heritage. Remember, Jesus taught in the synagogues, and Paul never stopped calling himself Jewish. She encourages Christians, and culturally Christian unbelievers, to do something few seem prepared to handle: to sit quietly with the word, let it grow on you, and test the message through language, thought, and dialogue.