As I keep telling you, things are really busy around here. Actually, the actual activity is not at its height, but my brain power is certainly being pulled in directions other than this one. Concentrating is quite a challenge, and when I’m in a state, I take refuge, as some do in food or drink, in rather frantic and frenetic reading of the most random stuff. Mostly pulled from the “New Releases” shelf which I scan like an anxiety-ridden addict. So, a few brief thoughts.
(I do have longer thoughts on a book I read a couple of months ago, that I’ve been meaning to blog about for ages…Karl Adam’s The Spirit of Catholicism. But that will have to wait. In the meantime, if you want to read it, you can do so online here.)
I’ll try to make it short:

• Bombay Anna is the “real” story of Anna Leonowens, known of course as Anna of The King and I.

It was a decent read, but with some problems, and a story that could probably have been told just as well in a 10,000 word magazine essay. Do those exist anymore?
The story of the mystery of Anna and her own reinvention is quite fascinating. If you haven’t already guessed it, The King and I and even Anna and the King of Siam (The Margaret Landon book that inspired the musical – after first inspiring a non-musical film with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison) are total, absolute fiction.
But the challenge for a biographer involves greater challenges that going beyond what Landon wrote – it involves going beyond the accounting Anna gave of her own early life.
Susan Morgan, the author, does some really extraordinary historical detective work to get to the bottom of all of this: in short, when Anna turned up in Singapore as a widow with two young children, a few years prior to scoring the Siam gig, she claimed to be a genteel English widow, who’d really never before set foot in the East. Which was not true – she had in fact been born in India, and Morgan’s account of the lives of westerners in early 19th century India is certainly fascinating. Anna was, indeed, a widow, when she arrived in Singapore, but she reinvented herself because she needed to work in some sort of genteel, fitting position (teaching, governess), and she felt sure (Morgan hypothesizes) that she would not have been accepted as she was – the (well-educated and very smart) child of an English lower-class soldier and probable interracial mother – among the Westerners in Singapore.
From there, Anna got her job in Siam, tutoring the king’s children – she sent her daughter (then around seven) to England to school, and took her son with her. The King was far more complex, you’ll be shocked to know, than he’s portrayed in the musical, having been, for example a Buddhist monk for two decades before ascending to the throne. Anna probably did play a role in assisting him with his relations with European nations and the US, as she translated, helped him communicate and understand the European mind.
I won’t go into more details, except to say that after about five years, Anna left Siam with her son, and ended up in the United States. She spent the rest of her life in the US and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, very well known as a writer and speaker – and she devoted much of her later years to helping her daughter raise her many children.
Interesting, little-known story. Problems: Book was padded and repetitious, not in terms of narrative but of analysis. Morgan has a pretty intense anti-religious stance. Anna herself was not traditionally Christian in beliefs or practice, but of course interacted a great deal with missionaries, often the only other Westerners around. She didn’t seem to think badly of them, but Morgan can’t help but write of them in mostly disparaging ways. Sometimes this is stretched to comical lengths as when Anna’s critiques of the harem are good because they are centered around issues of power and enslavement, while the missionaries were mostly scandalized by the sexual aspect of it. Or so Morgan says, although she doesn’t, in the text, give evidence to support these interpretations.
Which brings me to another, final critique (I always think these are going to be capsule reviews and then…). Anna came to fame in the US for authoring two books about her experiences. Morgan is constantly defining these books as containing large doses of fiction intermixed with the facts. She will cites something Anna writes and then say, “This obviously never happened,” but never relates why or on what basis she is making this claim. The whole issue of what exactly Anna wrote about her experiences and what she saw, how much she fictionalized and so on, is not well handled – it’s never clearly laid out what Anna wrote that was so patently false and on what basis they’re being evaluated as false.
But as I said..there’s really a lot of interest here, including much more than I’ve cited. Bring a little skepticism, an awareness of bias, and just read it for the very interesting – true story of Anna and the King. Well, as much as we can guess is true.

• The Voice is the autobiography of the celebrated bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff,

This was a quick read – I started it in the library playroom and finished it later that afternoon. The first half is very good, as Quasthoff relates the essentials of his life from birth to winning the ARD International Music Competition in 1988, which really propelled his career into high gear. But after that, the book gets rather scattered and a bit confusing. Still many engaging anecdotes, and satisfying swipes at various aspects of the music industry (swipes that are satisfying because you can very easily substitute “publishing” for “music” and come out with the same complaints and problems. Tough all over!)
Quasthoff, in case you didn’t know, is a victim of Thalidomide. I’ve always felt a certain..I don’t know..interest in…sympathy with…connection with …. victims of Thalidomide, for it’s one of those things about which you think…could have been me. Well, probably not, because my mother didn’t take it, but being born in 1960, I’ve thought about it. Maybe like people a generation before thought about polio? Maybe?
Anyway, Quasthoff deals very honestly but lightly with his disability. When I say “lightly,” I don’t mean for laughs (although he does have a sense of humor about it, the fruit of being treated like a normal kid by his family), but it is by no means the center of his memoir. It comes into play when he’s discussing the strong resistance his parents faced in trying to place him in regular school, or when he addresses the bigotry he encountered very early in his career. He faces challenges, but he places the challenges of being disabled in the same category as other challenges – the challenges of an artist keeping his focus, of developing his talents, of dealing with competition and business forces that seek to rip you off and so on.
An interesting, humbling, enjoyable book.

• I was reading on the back porch last night, and as Katie walked by, she asked, “What are you reading?” I told her, “In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism.“

You can imagine the look on her face. No words were necessary.
“It’s really good,” I insisted.
She didn’t seem to believe me. Astounding.
But it is! Author (and Vanderbilt Divinity prof) James Hudnut-Beumler examines the question of how American Protestant churches have supported themselves throughout history. The essential transition point occurred in the early Republic when, one by one, the old Colonial model that had prevailed in most areas – of essentially established churches existing because of community support, was killed and died, and churches had to figure out how to survive financially.
Many issues come into play, but two major themes that weave consistently through the narrative is the development of the concept of tithing and the changes in the understanding of “stewardship.” Hudnut-Beumier points out that tithing, as a Christian practice, was essentially invented and certainly institutionalized by American Protestants. The practice of weekly collections developed very, very slowly and was resisted in many places. Pew rents certainly played an important role in churches, some up to the 20th century, but it was actually not as dominant a means of church financing as we’ve sometimes assumed. There was a constant, dynamic conversation going on in Protestantism about stewardship and giving, various conversations certainly reflecting the tenor of different denominations. Methodists, for example, tending to spiritualize and broaden their understanding of stewardship more than say, Presbyterians or Episcopalians. Tensions erupted between the needs of foreign missions and local churches. One interesting factoid to me was that there was widespread concern among many American Protestant bodies in the early 20th century that support of foreign missions was falling off. However, at the same time, there was a huge church building boom going on, and the statistics the author presents indicate that for several denominations during this period, the debt accrued from church building far exceeded what was going to foreign missions.
The questions about stewardship bounced all over the place and reemerged in different forms every generation. Should stewardship be understood as primarily being about money or about a Christian’s whole life? Were fundraising efforts that depended on entertaining the giver or from which the giver derived some benefit legitimate, or were they manipulative and ultimately spiritually destructive?
And at every stage, church people are constantly, unfailingly frustrated at low levels of giving. As Americans became more prosperous, Protestant ministers fell in both status and income level, and church leaders could not help but notice that as Americans bought more and more stuff, they never seemed to manage to give any more to church.
Some..things..never change.
Since the author was focusing on American Protestantism, there was absolutely no reason for him to discuss Catholicism, but still, of course, I wish he had at a few times, just for helpful comparisons. (He does mention Archbishop Hughes of New York). For example, he speaks of how, in the late 19th century, American Protestants started thinking of their church facilities as more than worship spaces to be used at most twice a week. It was during this time that the idea of multifacted programming started taking off, and so church plants had to match those needs of having many Sunday School classrooms, meeting rooms, auditoriums, gyms, and so on. I couldn’t help but think of Catholic churches during this period, many of which naturally served these purposes, since so many had schools attached. It would have been interesting to have some sort of comparison. I’m sure it exists, somewhere, in some journal, but I’d like to have seen it here.
I do think, if there’s anyone out there involved in stewardship, in any Christian denomination, it’s worth it to take a look at this book. So often, we tend to look at the past through those blasted rose-colored glasses, thinking that in the past, Christians were so generous, while today, they’re so cheap. We also tend to look at the models we have for these things – what a church is and how its members should financially support it – as something that just is . Examining and thinking about how and why these models developed, and realizing that the conversations we’re having now and the concerns and frustrations are not at all new, it seems to me, is very important. Especially for Catholics who not only suffer from historical blindness, but from deep Protestant envy when it comes to giving and stewardship.
We certainly have our own history which complicates and informs the question of how and why Catholics give (or don’t), but when I look at the many, many conversations I’ve witnessed about stewardship among Catholics over the past twenty years and the materials that are out there, as we have discovered “stewardship” in its present form, I’ve sensed that a lot of these rather frantic conversations are grounded in a belief that this model of “time talent and treasure” stewardship spirituality is something that we have to do because 1) Protestants do it and 2) It obviously works for Protestants and 3) Protestants have been doing this very successful thing for a very long time and it’s all very Biblical and stuff…are assumptions that are not borne out by history. Their own history.