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A review by moreteamorecats
Spirits of Protestantism, Volume 13: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity by Pamela E. Klassen
4.0
The absolutely brilliant theoretical insight here: If you want to understand 20th/21st-c. liberal Protestants, look at their implicit theological anthropology, by way of their healing practices. That gets you straight to worldview, including the surprising supernatural and postcolonial features. I've been trying to explain versions of that to interested friends and skeptics since really becoming Episcopalian. Klassen nails it. This is how you use Foucault today: Don't just quote him (though she does, and unusually adeptly). Follow the lines of inquiry he opens, in directions he'd never have touched.
The research nuggets (mostly archival, with one ethnographic chapter at the end) are interesting too, but I was less compelled by them. Probably it's because, well, I'm a native informant on a lot of this material. I may have been present at some of the services she visited (at least two of her subjects are personal acquaintances). Some of this history, too, I know better than she does. Some of this is relatively petty details (you'd think she could mention Church Missionary Society was an evangelical, not a liberal group); some is more structural (her ignorance of pre-Stonewall queer church history hurts her fourth chapter quite a bit—granted, [b:Recruiting Young Love|10257765|Recruiting Young Love How Christians Talk about Homosexuality|Mark D. Jordan|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347345106s/10257765.jpg|15158050] is the book I'd hand her, and she wouldn't have had access to it while writing.)
In a classroom, what I'd really want to do is excerpt the most relevant chapters so that students could see her interpretive facility at work. You'd want different parts of her argument in a theology class than in a religious studies class, and the full thing almost never, as it's ultimately a quite specialized argument on the best methods for studying liberal Protestantism as such. Because the book is built as a continuous argument and doesn't circle back to define her new terms, that sort of excerpting would be difficult.
So I think this helps define my star rating, for academic books. Five-star means "classic, everyone should read it". Four-star would mean "I'd assign it"; I'm not sure this book quite meets that standard, but I'd still look for ways. So call it 3.5 star, rounded up.
The research nuggets (mostly archival, with one ethnographic chapter at the end) are interesting too, but I was less compelled by them. Probably it's because, well, I'm a native informant on a lot of this material. I may have been present at some of the services she visited (at least two of her subjects are personal acquaintances). Some of this history, too, I know better than she does. Some of this is relatively petty details (you'd think she could mention Church Missionary Society was an evangelical, not a liberal group); some is more structural (her ignorance of pre-Stonewall queer church history hurts her fourth chapter quite a bit—granted, [b:Recruiting Young Love|10257765|Recruiting Young Love How Christians Talk about Homosexuality|Mark D. Jordan|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347345106s/10257765.jpg|15158050] is the book I'd hand her, and she wouldn't have had access to it while writing.)
In a classroom, what I'd really want to do is excerpt the most relevant chapters so that students could see her interpretive facility at work. You'd want different parts of her argument in a theology class than in a religious studies class, and the full thing almost never, as it's ultimately a quite specialized argument on the best methods for studying liberal Protestantism as such. Because the book is built as a continuous argument and doesn't circle back to define her new terms, that sort of excerpting would be difficult.
So I think this helps define my star rating, for academic books. Five-star means "classic, everyone should read it". Four-star would mean "I'd assign it"; I'm not sure this book quite meets that standard, but I'd still look for ways. So call it 3.5 star, rounded up.