Book Review: Claiming The Beatitudes: Nine Stories from a New Generation

Our dean recently spent a week with some of the great thinkers in contemporary Western Christianity. The Rev. John Philip Newell, who led our congregation in last year's Celtic Spirituality retreat, invited Dean Richardson to join authors Barbara Brown Taylor, David Crumm and others to ponder a single question: What is the future of Christianity?

To no one's surprise, the great thinkers didn't converge on a single answer. But they agreed on one point: the future is in the hands of the young. Demographically, this point hardly raises eyebrows. In practice, however, each generation takes jealous hold of "our" church, wresting it from the grip of our parents while guarding it ferociously against our children's new ideas. As a teen I scandalized my rector by supporting women's ordination. Now I find myself scandalized by the U2charist. Do I not need, just as much as my "elders" did, to be confronted with the prophetic role of the young?

The Rev. Anne Sutherland Howard's book, Claiming the Beatitudes: Nine Stories from a New Generation (2009, The Alban Institute) does just that. Anne Howard directs the Beatitudes Society, a progressive Christian leadership movement centered in divinity schools and seminaries. The beatitudes, she writes, "give us a lens through which to see Jesus and the God he proclaimed."

And the prophetic work of young Christians gives us a lens through which to see the beatitudes. Each of the nine central chapters in Claiming the Beatitudes focuses on one of the beatitudes and on one young adult who is living it out. Howard lets these women and men tell their own stories. After each story, she adds her own reflections, drawing on her deep knowledge of scripture. Some of the stories:

• Chris, the privileged son of a San Francisco venture capitalist, now a Massachusetts youth minister, exploring poverty in spirit by creating a multi-year partnership with a Mississippi church devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
  
• Alex, a Berkeley theology student, a "Type A white male" living out meekness through nonviolence toward the planet and her creatures.
• Greta, who realized the human cost of cheap consumer goods while inventorying a warehouse full of t-shirts made in Central America, discovering her hunger and thirst for justice and leaving a successful CPA career in favor of ordained ministry.

While I was reading the book, I found myself wishing Howard had given her voice more rein while telling the stories of the young students and ministers. Their words, captured from conversation, are less articulate than her written reflection might have been. But is not my wish just one more insistence that the experience of the young be filtered through the "wisdom" of the old?

Anne Howard will be visiting St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday, November 15. She will preach at the 8:00 and 10:30 services and will talk about her book (of which copies will be available) at the 9:00 forum. Don't just experience this fine author through my filter! Whether you are young, old, or in-between, you'll want to meet Anne Howard for yourself.

Claiming The Beatitudes: Nine Stories from a New Generation, by Anne Sutherland Howard. The Alban Institute 2009

-Catherine Thiemann