Bishop Books

After two difficult years, private investigator Erik Whiteside finally succeeds in finding the bad boy brother Win Hammond of elderly Miss Addie. Not long afterward, Win returns to Hilton Head allegedly to see his sister. However, Erik's "partner" at Simpson and Tanner, Inquiry Agents Lydia "Bay" Tanner wonders what the odious Win really wants. She and her family, friends of Miss Addie, plan to insure her sibling does not rip her off as they expect him try.

At the same time that the prodigal brother returns home, Bay and Erik have two other clients. Karen Zwilling better known to her customers as Britt Swensen, an escort service employee, wants Bay to find a male rapist, and a Georgia socialite Star Kennedy wants her to locate her beloved Wade, who vanished without a trace. When a badly battered corpse is found on the beach, Bay ponders if one of her cases just has been solved, but which one. Not sure, she keeps digging until she finds herself being yanked by the wealthy and the poor of the underbellies of society.

The sixth Bay Tanner regional mystery is a terrific entry as three distinct cases keep the Inquiry Agent and her wannabe partner Erik hopping. The Savannah feel to the delightful story line augments the investigations that Bay and Erik conduct. Fans of Southern heated mysteries will want to read Kathryn R. Wall's latest Georgia peach escapades.

Harriet Klausner

Bishop Carder can say more in one sentence than most can say in an essay. This book is filled with little vingette's that are timeless. Bishop Carder reflects on various issues facing the church and ministry in today's world. While the book is targeted for UMC pastors, its advice and counsel is pertinent for all of us.
If you are in the ministry, I would HIGHLY suggest this book be read time and time again.

Bishop's Stortford is one of those lazy country towns England is famous for. Halfway between London and the university city of Cambridge it has educated the boys and girls of farmers, city brokers, university lectures and bakers alike, and can count among its former pupils international sportsmen and the current head of the UK Security service, MI5. This detailed book, written to commemorate a century of education is a brilliant insight into the reality of English Public School education in the middle of the 20th century.

This book features Bishop vs. Mountjoy his arch-enemy from the same timeline as him. Mountjoy is a mutant and a homocidal killer on a rampage through New York. I would give the artwork 200% if there was even such a thing. This also shows a lot about Bishop's character and was one of his first limited series. If you are a Bishop fan, then this is a definitely must buy!

I found this book very informative especially for a newly consecrated Bishop in the Lord's Church. Bishop Ellis continues to be a blessing to the entire Body of Christ and to African-American prelates everywhere.

From the book's back page: It is widely agreed that any united Church of the future must be episcopal. All reunion schemes between episcopal and non-episcopal churches provide for this; it is an essential feature of the current proposals for a Covenant for unity between a number of British churches. However, it is by no means clear what the churches which at present have no acknowledged bishops are being asked to take on; and in churches which have episcopacy in the historic succession, there is widespread dissatisfaction with how episcopacy works in practice.

The purpose of this book is to clarify the whole subject by presenting a series of reflections on episcopacy as practiced in very different situations throughout the world. The contributors, all leading figures in their own churches, include Roman Catholics from Spain, France and Holland, a Greek Orthodox, an Old Catholic, a Coptic Christian, Lutherans from Scandinavia and Germany, and a bishop from the Church of South India, as well as representatives of Anglican episcopacies in England and in East Africa.

Contributors are: Kallistos Ware, Louis Bouyer, J. Visser, Olegario Gonzales de Cardedal, G. H. Bebawi, Fredric Cleve, Hermann Dietzfelbinger, Joseph Lescrauwaet, J. R. H. Moorman, Leslie Brown and Lesslie Newbigin.

Christ is black. But appearance is only a piece of it; Christ is black in his solidarity with the Black community in US America, struggling in the face of White racism. Kelly Brown Douglas, in this quick and to-the-point synopsis, re-members the historical origins of the black Christ, his theological development and then asks some critical questions about the black Christ in her own context - now almost fifteen years ago.
We enter the history, with Douglas, during the height of slavery in US America. Douglas identifies two types of Christianity that live among both Blacks and Whites in the States at that time. "Slave Christianity" saw Jesus (the Black Christ) as liberator, identifying with the Black community's struggle for health and freedom. "Slaveholding Christianity" justified slavery and made Jesus (the White Christ) into an icon of hope for the future - things would be better in the "bye and bye." The Black Christ, then, as Douglas argues, developed early - if not explicitly - within the imaginations of adherents to "Slave Christianity."
During the Civil Rights Struggle and Black Nationalist movements of the sixties and seventies, people like Martin King and Malcolm X propelled concepts of the Black Christ into more explicit - and public - consideration. Culminating in X's claim in a 1963 interview that "Christ wasn't white; Christ was a black man," Black Christianity - like Slave Christianity before it - began, more explicitly, to highlight Christ's connection to the struggle for Black freedom in the context of lived history - disregarding for a time "Slaveholding (White) Christianity's "bye and bye."
Forced into action, Douglas claims, by the bold, public assertions of people like King and X about the nature of Black Christianity - and the Black Christ - Black theologians began thinking critically about the color of Christ. By the early seventies, though in differently nuanced ways, three Black theologians - Albert Cleage, James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts - had claimed that, indeed, Christ was black. Cleage thought Jesus was historically a black man. Cone imagined his blackness to lie sufficiently in his struggle with Black people. And Roberts understood his blackness to be a particularizing image among many possibilities of imaging Jesus in the world.
But, Kelly Brown Douglas wonders, is Christ's blackness enough. She, along with other womanist scholars, question whether race is the only obstacle on the path toward freedom. She imagines, in the end, that the blackness of Jesus is only one part in the multifaceted struggle which with he identifies. Christ is Black, she affirms, but suggests he's also female, same-sex oriented, economically disadvantaged and so on.

Douglas, I think, does a helpful thing in so clearly and concisely presenting the history of the Black Christ. For those who've never imagined the possibility of a black Christ - either White or Black; for those who've been inclined to accept a black Christ, but who lacked the historical precedents to justify it; and for those, too, who've considered the Black Christ a psychological invention of the black consciousness era; Douglas' The Black Christ provides clarifying history, which must (if only by exhibiting the metaphor's historical staying power) be taken seriously. Her elucidation of the Black Christ's origins in US American, Black "Slave Christianity" is particularly helpful, I think, in establishing precedence - and socio-intellectual credibility - for the Black Nationalists' bold claims in the sixties. Douglas' seamless portrayal of the social and intellectual movement, in relation to the Black Christ through history, illustrates a Black Christ that is and has been necessarily central to Christian worship and theology in US American Black communities.
The 117 pages of Douglas' The Black Christ tell a remarkably long tale of Black struggle in remarkably few pages. Her work, simply in terms of "brevity" and "breadth" is impressive. Positively, this approach welcomes readers who are looking for a quick, clear history of the topic. But this approach limits what Douglas is able to accomplish. Even as it is, on the one hand, a strength, one of the main problems with the book is its brevity - Douglas doesn't give enough attention to her subject, in general, and her conclusion, in particular. So much of the work she does here begs for further nuance and illustration. I will re-member one of these cases and tease you with the basics of another.
First, Douglas too quickly dismisses black, male theologians, in particular J. Deotis Roberts, in their understandings of the Black Christ. Essentially, Douglas ends up saying that the Black Christ - as it has historically (and theologically) been represented - isn't "enough." She understands Christ's solidarity to be not only in terms of blackness, but also in terms of gender, sexual orientation and so on - standing by all oppressed people groups. Similarly, at least in the way Douglas represented him, J. Deotis Roberts considered Christ applicable ("universal") to all kinds of human situations. Speaking in terms of race, but suggestive of other social categories, Roberts writes that like the White Christ or the Red Christ, "the Black Messiah is also the universal word made flesh." Later, in response to internal (Black) critiques that he was acquiescing to the Academy in his assertion of a universal Christ, Roberts said he didn't want Black theologians to make "Jesus a captive of black culture as [they] reject the cultural captivity of Jesus depicted by Euro-Americans." Clearly Roberts was trying to develop an image of Christ, even as Douglas admits, "that was not potentially exclusive or oppressive of others."
Despite her recognition of Roberts' attempt to diversify Black understandings of Christ's solidarity, Douglas - in her conclusion - overshadows this nuance to move to her main point. She roundly critiques the work that Black, male theologians have done, highlighting again that "calling Christ Black does not acknowledge that skin color is not the only barrier to Black liberation." To her credit, Douglas exploited what Roberts didn't explicitly say, to make her point more resolutely. Without explicitly recognizing the oppression within the Black community, Christ - as black male, but not as black female or black same-sex oriented - cannot be wholly liberating.
Attention should not be diverted from Douglas' point - the Black Christ is not adequate. The Black Christ, though, leaves untold, the degree to which Black, male theologian, especially Roberts, (not to mention feminist women - who Douglas admits "contribute," and then harshly critiques,) contributed to the movement from a solely Black Christ to a more wholly liberating image of Jesus.
I have similar concerns - in terms of nuance - with Douglas' attention to Jesus/Christ as icon. Malcolm X hated that the White Christ was hanging in all the churches and that Black people "bowed" to it. Besides calling churches to hang pictures of "heroic" women and men as more appropriate images of Christ in their churches, Douglas does nothing to deal with the profound religious status given to iconography. Jesus - as an historical person (one person, not the "image of Jesus" in others) - will always be an icon. Douglas' dabbling in icon talk begged a more complete exploration of how a diversely identifiable Jesus might be imaged.

This examination of the life and miracles of St. John Maximotvich is heartening reading not only for Orthodox Christians, not only for Californians who are blessed to have his relics, not only for North Americans who, unlike other Orthodox Churches in their "western captivity", have been blessed with their own saints, but for anyone who has a compassionate heart. This well written work is the clearest reading of the life of this remarkable man who had the gift of doing "ordinary things in an extraordinary way." Fr. Seraphim's account is neither sentimental nor disengaged, and the best I have read about this saint's life.

Unbeknownst to many Americans, the brave men who flew the night-time bombing missions over occupied Europe never received campaign medals. Their war, deemed so essential by the British government during the conflict, fell into disfavor as the horrors of city bombing became known. In this excellent new book by British historian and writer Patrick Bishop, the author looks unflinchingly at the terrible carnage of German cities resulting from the bomber campaign, but also puts the strategy into perspective from the place and time it was waged.

The men and boys who flew the heavy bombers over Europe performed acts of extraordinary courage. A staggering number of these men perished in the course of the war. Bishop, through skillful interweaving of overall bomber command histories and personal accounts, puts a human face on the story, covering everything from living conditions on the bases, to the controversial British policy of LMF--lack of moral fiber. As you read this book, you are drawn into the lives of the individuals as well as the broad sweep of the policies that drove them to do what they did.

Bishop skillfully makes the point that, as flawed as area bombing as a policy may have been, the men who carried out the policy deserve much more recognition for their deeds than has been accorded them to date.

Another good book on this topic is Max Hastings' 'Bomber Command'.


Rob Morris, Author 'Untold Valor: Forgotten Stories of American Bomber Crews Over Europe in World War Two', Potomac, 2006.

This collection of humorous verse occasionally appears to be from Dr. Seuss, for example there is the verse on page 100

SONG OF THE POP-BOTTLERS

Pop bottles pop-bottles
In pop shops;
The pop-bottles Pop bottles
Poor Pop drops.

When Pop drops pop-bottles,
Pop-bottles plop!
Pop-bottle-tops topple!
Pop mops slop!

Stop! Pop'll drop bottle!
Stop, Pop, stop!
When Pop bottles pop-bottles,
Pop-bottles pop!

which reminded me of the Dr. Seuss book, "Hop on Pop"

A great deal of poetic license is taken, and in general it works. As is the case with much of humorous verse, there are double entendres everywhere. For example, one of my favorites appears on page 94

NOT UNMINDFUL OF THE NEGATIVE AS I AM NOT . . .

Not inconsiderable is the sympathy I share
With the negative-lovers, a not unplentiful lot;
Yet it is not impossible to be not unaware
Of the disadvantages of the double and quadruple Not.

The negative fails of being not inexact;
One Not too many, too few, and what have you got?
Your not innocuous Not will then react!
If Not's not not, then prithee, what's Not not?

I enjoyed reading this book, while some of the verse borders on the nonsensical, most of it stay sensible and it was fun picking out the many double entendres. Although I am sure that I missed some of them.