October 31, 2012

When people who don’t know a lot about American Christianity hear that I am Mennonite, they sometimes ask if it’s the same as being Mormon. No, I say, and add a stock reply: other than starting with the same letter of the alphabet and being inscrutable to outsiders, the groups are quite different.

After reading Joanna Brooks’s memoir The Book of Mormon Girl, I will no longer answer with such alacrity.

The Color of Christ confronts the complicated history of the Christ image and racial politics in the United States. Edward Blum and Paul Harvey's ambitious—some might say audacious—aim is to track “the creating and exercise of racial and religious power through the images of Jesus and how that power has been experienced by everyday people.”

Fleming Rutledge is the most interesting preacher today working the fault line between the mainline churches and evangelicalism. Throughout this remarkable collection of Old Testament sermons she calls for mainliners and evangelicals to realize their common identity in Christ for the sake of our mutual mission in the world.