Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World Hardcover – 19 March 2019
by SERENE JONES (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 75 ratings
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In a world full of moral and spiritual challenges, Rev. Dr. Serene Jones reveals a spiritual path open to all seekers who want real guidance through complicated issues that affect us all.
As the president of the Union Theological Seminary, Rev. Dr. Serene Jones is one of America's foremost theologians. In this bracingly honest and practical book, Rev. Dr. Jones takes us on an emotional and intellectual journey to bring spirituality back into our lives. Reconnecting with our spirituality--with a sense of the divine--allows us all to live better, together, and answers many of the seemingly intractable problems we are facing today. Drawing from the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and other great minds, as well as from deeply moving and personal experiences, Rev. Dr. Jones offers readers a rich guidebook for living a more honest, grace-filled life. In an era of increasing estrangement, anxiety, and gloom across the personal, political, and economic landscape, Call It Grace provides us with a vision of a system for how to live--how to suffer, cherish, endure, and thrive--and with a way to approach and understand our divine natures, impulses, and possibilities. Written for everyone--men and women, left and right, skeptic and believer, people of all backgrounds and persuasions--Call It Grace is a book for today's radical age of anxiety, a book as serious and socially critical as it is helpful and broadly accessible.
Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars 75 ratings
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Praise for Serene Jones and Call It Grace
"A moving, personal reflection on the alchemy of race, gender, class and theology in rural America and beyond written by one of the leading progressive theologians in the United States, Serene Jones."
--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
"Serene Jones, the first woman to head the Union Theological Seminary, is one of the most visible faces of the religious left. . . . Call It Grace discusses her Oklahoma background, her intellectual influences, and how concepts such as original sin and forgiveness fit into her vision of Christianity. That vision, at heart, encompasses the values of many progressives, even those who are nonbelievers. As she writes, the four 'foundations' of her theology are 'the necessity of our interconnecting breath, the importance of struggling for justice, the beauty of mercy, and the ultimate power of love.'"
--The New Yorker
"Jones offers a deeply personal reflection on her spiritual journey and what it means to connect with the divine. . . . moving, illuminating."
--Lion's Roar
"I once listed my dear, spectacular friend Serene Jones as my 'spiritual advisor, ' and she is that and so much more. Our impassioned conversations across the last six years and through travel and adventures together and apart, have shaped [my] writing in a thousand ways and flow all the way through it."
--Krista Tippett, author of Becoming Wise and On Being
"'Theology' is one of those words that sends people in another direction these days, but this book is a beautifully written reminder of what it might mean in reality. For a tired, divided, angry world, this volume is a great blessing."
--Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
"Compelling as well as wise, the theology this book embodies arises from a life fully lived. Serene Jones is a wonderful storyteller, whose wisdom is earned--which makes what she has to say both powerful and inspiring."
--Betty Sue Flowers, book editor and series consultant, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth
"Serene Jones demonstrates the vitality of faith in a dangerous and uncertain world. She writes with passion about her joys as well as her sorrows. A book both inspirational and practical."
--Bill Bradley, former U.S. senator and author of We Can All Do Better
"Jones is a plainspoken, talented teacher and this moving memoir illustrates her deeply reflective ethics and eloquently captures Jones's response to her life's trials."
--Publishers Weekly
"[Jones's] engaging stories illustrate complex theological and philosophical ideas, presenting a vision of hope for the future. This book makes a strong case for the progressive power of theology that will be appreciated by socially engaged readers."
--Library Journal (starred review)
Book Description
In a world full of moral and spiritual challenges, Rev. Dr. Serene Jones reveals a spiritual path open to all seekers who want real guidance through complicated issues that affect us all.
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4.4 out of 5 stars
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Timothy Carson
5.0 out of 5 stars You can call it Grace and even Amazing
Reviewed in the United States on 26 March 2019
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Serene Jones takes the theological giant John Calvin and brings him forward in ways that no one has for me before. Considering my relative bias and ignorance of his actual writings it is just short of a miracle that I am about to pick up and read The Institutes. Unbeknownst to her unsuspecting readers she slides almost every other theological/social issue in on you with the same Oklahoma red dirt cast. Before you know it you’ve taken the bait and then she just reels you on in.
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Virginia Musician
3.0 out of 5 stars challenging book
Reviewed in the United States on 12 July 2019
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This is a wrenching personal account of specific hardships experienced by the author, but an interesting introduction to Oklahoma roots, Calvin's teachings, and a challenge to find sanity in the current political mess enveloping our country. Very worthwhile reading. Only question is why she insists on references to God as feminine. Why not all-inclusive, beyond our imagination, either all genders or none--as in Native American term "Great Spirit"?
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Susan T.
3.0 out of 5 stars I was disappointed...
Reviewed in the United States on 6 July 2019
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This book was recommended to me for it's treatment of original sin, which I have been exploring lately. I thought she had me with the Introduction and first chapter. Then she waxed poetic about John Calvin, whose theology has always been problematic for me. I got to the third chapter and there was just too much "total depravity" and no mention at all of predestination per Calvin, which in my view contradicts much of what she espoused in the earlier parts of the book. Well written but just not my cup of tea.
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Mimi's pen
5.0 out of 5 stars Theology becomes existential
Reviewed in the United States on 31 October 2019
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What I love about Jones' book is that she goes from actual memoir experiences to explain her theology--existential because it starts with true existence to explain abstract theological terms like sin and grace.
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Roger Kingston
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it.
Reviewed in the United States on 25 March 2021
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The author demonstrates Grace through her writing. She is incredibly open about her own life using it to discuss how she sees many Christian concept such as Grace, Sin, Forgiveness, and many other parts of her faith that help enlighten these concepts for her.
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Charles
May 15, 2019Charles rated it really liked it
A few weeks ago, I had never heard of Serene Jones or Union Theological Seminary. I found out about both when Jones participated in a Q&A with the New York Times.
In that piece, she shared her doubts about the virgin birth and the resurrection, among other things. Her views weren't particularly shocking by themselves, but I was fascinated because of Jones' position as president of a theological seminary.
I was raised to believe that a "Christian" is someone who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Christian denominations exist for the sole purpose of clarifying, communicating, and protecting their clear ideas about the nature of God, right? So how can a person who scoffs at the traditional premise of the faith find her way into a career as a theologian and administrator at one of the country's oldest seminaries?
This book answers that question in detail, explaining Jones' familial background and her spiritual journey. And those parts of the book are extremely satisfying. Jones carefully articulates her ideas and gives numerous examples of the theologians, both famous and obscure, that helped shape her outlook.
The structure of the book, though, feels a bit like a conversation with a stranger at a party or bar. You start a casual conversation, and soon you become keenly aware that this is a person of unusual depth. You venture onto the topic of God and the next thing you know, you've talked all night. They closed down the bar and then the coffee shop and now it's dawn and you're in someone's kitchen listening as the conversation turns down yet another new path.
What I mean is that it's not an especially coherent, polished presentation of ideas or story. Rather, it's an interesting narrative that at times wanders or gets stuck a little too long on one topic. Like that interesting stranger at the bar, the author needs to be occasionally nudged back on track or to be led back to a particularly interesting point.
The best parts are when she connects the dots and clearly applies her theological outlook to the big conflicts in her life. Like how she coped with her community's racist past, or how her ideas of God's grace and forgiveness were undermined by the horror of the Oklahoma City bombing as well as the subsequent trial and execution of McVeigh.
Other parts, like when she muses about her grandfather and her mother (or to a lesser her extent her sisters, ex-husband and daughter), are somewhat jumbled and felt ...muddier?
Those muddy parts are where new details appear abruptly, giving the "conversation" an ugly turn and completely changing the nature of the book. When revelations about her mother are introduced late in the book, for example, it seems like the end of the memoir is more an exercise in personal therapy...the author working through her complex feelings... rather than the objective theological treatise of earlier chapters.
Overall, it's a solid memoir that includes a lifetime of suggestions for further reading. (less)
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Joanna
Jan 28, 2020Joanna rated it liked it
Had high hopes for this book...
After listening to a recent interview of Serene Jones on NPR, I eagerly looked forward to reading, Call It Grace. The book is part memoir, part reflection, part theological essay. I'm not certain it really succeeds. As memoir, Jones weaves in family history and memories of her Oakie childhood and racist relatives.
I'm not understanding how she excoriates her racist, child-molesting grandfather on the one hand, while also going on and on about how her background has molded and shaped her to be the conscious and committed person she's become. She honors the hardscrabble lives of her forebears and acknowledges the profound impact they have on her.
Then there's her mother! What a mother! A hateful, vicious, selfish and disturbed woman that Serene Jones never quite gets around to seeing or understanding as mentally unstable. The woman she describes sounds like a classic bipolar. Jones writes about her pettiness, jealousy, vindictiveness and shallow, self-absorption amidst the tight societal confines of 1950's rural America.
Much more than 1950’s mores created the monster her mother became and remained throughout life that ended with deathbed cruelty. Serene Jones tries to frame her mother’s actions against the context of theological ideas of mercy, justice, redemption and faith. Yet, spilling from the frame are un-discussed, never-mentioned example after example of mental instability that screams mental illness. It’s the elephant in the room that Serene Jones just doesn’t see, acknowledge or mention.
Call It Grace gets bogged down in many spots. It drags and is wordy. Chapters are overly long. Jones attempts to peel back the layers of her own theological growth and those theologians and thinkers who influenced her. She weaves back and forth, traveling from the Midwest to India, then Yale and Union Theological Seminary.
Although her understanding of her own journey may be clear to Serene Jones, she doesn’t always make it clear to the reader. So although she offers tidbits of understanding about her family and the people who’ve influenced her, I came away from the book, still unclear about a lot.
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Jason
Apr 23, 2019Jason rated it liked it
Not bad. This coming from an atheist. I have more in common with SJ than I do some atheist friends. She clearly has an open mind and a kind, human spirit. It’s a bit lightweight in the way it handles other factors besides theology in approaching how one ‘should’ live a good life. There is an entire branch of philosophy (kierkegaard aside) devoted to this topic, not to mention scads that can be learned from various psychological fields (esp those dealing with motivation and loss). Yes, I know an ‘academic’ critique but it can’t be helped. Still there is one fatal area of disagreement—and that is the unwavering assumption that ‘god’ however framed here, is the purveyor of grace, and not it’s counterpart, sin. I disagree with this dichotomy as I can’t reconcile otherwise based on this single reading. Otherwise a decent work with a human story. (less)
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Nancy
Jul 21, 2020Nancy rated it it was amazing
Well....if you want something besides Covid and politics to think about, this is the book for you. The author includes much of her life as she explores facets of faith that need to be explored personally by each of us. Highly recommend you read this alone first before you read it in a book group.
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Elaine
Aug 25, 2019Elaine rated it it was amazing
I couldn't put it down. SJ is a gifted writer who made a theological memoir into a page turner. As it happens I land in the same theological terrain as she and found a kindred spirit here. ...more
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David Guy
Sep 01, 2019David Guy rated it really liked it
The first thing that strikes you about Serene Jones graceful memoir is its bold and unflinching honesty. She is President of the Union Theological Seminary, and the daughter of a minister who has fought all his life for civil rights and the rights of all people, but she lets us know early on that her grandfather—that wonderful father’s father—was an overt racist and was also sexually abusive to the young women in the family. Her mother, though she was a striking beauty and nominally a Christian, was a self-centered woman who resented her children and treated them badly all their lives. The tirade against her daughter that this woman goes on in her early seventies, when Serene was assuming her post as President of Union, was almost unbelievable in its pettiness and viciousness. She seemed not to have learned a thing in her seventy years of life.
Jones begins winningly with a Forward that announces her six core beliefs, and even to me, a man with a Christian background who now practices Zen, they sound accurate and true to experience.[1] She organizes her book according to what she calls stations of the cross, by which she means key moments that taught her something important, and she tells the story of the early stations succinctly and gracefully. This isn’t the kind of memoir that blathers on with a lot of detail. She talks at some length about the theology of John Calvin, who is apparently central to the thinking of her denomination, the Disciples of Christ, and almost (but not quite) convinces me I should look into his work (she admits that others have a different take on Calvin).[2] And her foray into liberation theology, when she travels to India and becomes very seriously ill with dysentery, is not only an admirable (if perhaps slightly foolish) venture, but she relates her experience to that of the mystic Teresa of Avila, who described four stages of prayer, and in that country where she was surrounded by Hindus and mystics of various kinds, she has what seems very much like an experience of No Self. That’s the good news. The bad news is that she nearly died.[3]
I have to say that I found these early chapters thrilling, and I haven’t really covered all their richness, what she calls the prairie theology of Oklahoma, reflected perhaps most notably in her grandmother, her gradual education through other famous thinkers, like Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Howard Thurman, and her father’s bravery in the face of racism and bigotry. But the book bogged down in the middle, when she got into more traditional Christian concerns (in the second half of the book, the stations are such things as forgiveness, justice, mercy, love), especially the long chapter about forgiveness. In that chapter—surprisingly, after all she’d been through and understood—she seemed to be trying to measure up to some standard of behavior instead of examining what was happening. It was hard enough to try to forgive her husband after their divorce, but she got terribly bogged down with the idea that she should be able to forgive Timothy McVeigh. Talk about impossible tasks.
I happened, right about the time I was reading that chapter of the book, to read a teaching on forgiveness by the Buddhist teacher Susan Piver. It’s well worth a listen, but the gist of it is: feel what you feel when you’re feeling it. If you’re feeling anger (toward Timothy McVeigh), just feel that. Don’t stifle it. Don’t try to measure up to an ideal. As a friend once said to me (about a much more trivial situation): when you understand why the person did what they did, you’ll automatically forgive them. Until you do understand it, you can’t forgive them. It may be that we’ll never understand Timothy McVeigh, but so it goes. We’ll leave that to the saints.
Jones does have a chapter on Breath, when she gives a harrowing account of her battle with cancer, but even there I felt she was overintellectualizing, quoting a Western philosopher named Luce Irigaray, who somehow manages to turn that physiological function into something to think about (when any meditator will tell you just to feel it. It’s a miracle!). Jones largely recovers in her final two chapters, when she gets back to the difficulties of her parents. The closer she stays to her experience as it actually is, the better her writing.
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Luke Hillier
Feb 06, 2021Luke Hillier rated it liked it
Shelves: christianity, theology, memoir-bio
I found deep value in Jones's writing and theological imagination in Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World, 2nd Edition, so opted to give this a go when I found it on sale after Christmas. As a graduate of Denison University's religion department (known as a feeder into Union Theological Seminary) and a seminarian elsewhere, I'd say that I was most curious to read about Jones's experiences as the president there. In the end, there's literally only one chapter that actually focuses on that season of her life, and it reads as a sort of apologia for the enormously controversial choice she made early into her time in the role to sell off a corner of campus to what will be 42 stories of luxury condos. Given Union's reputation as the quintessential progressive, social-justice-centered seminary (a legacy that's merited, sure, but a bit cringily overblown by Jones), this promotion of capitalistic gentrification has earned scathing critique from students, alumni, and faculty. I will say that Jones makes a decent case for her sense of having no other feasible options that would keep the seminary open (a factor that, annoyingly, few seem to acknowledge in the critiques I found).
But for better or for worse, that's not really what the book's about. Jones situates her narrative as a reflection on our roots as the thing that shapes us, and there is extensive reflection on her Oklahoma upbringing and the family that she comes from. For me, a bit too much. The book read a bit bloated to me, and I think it would've been improved by paring down the earlier chapters which focus on different members of Jones's family tree. I was honestly tempted to give up about 40 pages in, but powered through and am ultimately glad I did. Of course, a memoir is a particular personal writing endeavor, and I have the sense that Jones wrote this more for herself and her family than for potential readers.
Thankfully, it picks up steam once she reaches young adulthood in the narrative, and I was particularly engaged by her chapter on the year she lived in India as a seminarian, her reflections on breath via the near-death experiences of her daughter and herself, and the aforementioned chapter on Union. Interestingly, those stand out amid the collection as entries that could function as independent essays, and are less intertwined with the book's more central arc of Jones and her family. And maybe that's the issue? The book tries to offer an unflinchingly honest reflection of Jones's complicated family and the trials they've faced, a love letter to her Oklahoma origins, and a theological reflection informed by those who came before her on pivotal episodes from Jones's life. We're told they all intertwine, but it didn't feel that way, and I personally preferred the third category most.
P.S. I am absolutely BAFFLED that the vindictive, merciless, unhinged woman Jones's describes as her mother spent decades as a successful marriage and family counselor and spiritual director!! And a bit troubled that her father, who otherwise comes across like such a marvelous man here, never seemed troubled by his wife's cruelty towards their children to knock her off the pedestal he held her on. (less)
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