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Turning South: Christian Scholars in an Age of World Christianity
Reading a Different Story: A Christian Scholar's Journey from America to Africa
Christianity's demographics, vitality, and influence have tipped markedly toward the global South and East. Addressing this seismic shift, a noted Christian literary scholar recounts how her focus has shifted from American to African literature.
Susan VanZanten began her career working on nineteenth-century American literature. A combination of personal circumstances, curricular demands, world events, and unfolding scholarship have led her to teach, research, and write about African literature and to advocate for a global approach to education and scholarship. This is the second book in the Turning South series, which offers reflections by eminent Christian scholars who have turned their attention and commitments beyond North America.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 14, 2014
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185 people want to read
About the author
Susan Vanzanten
3 books1 followerSusan VanZanten (PhD, Emory University) is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington, and leads faculty workshops and retreats across the country. She is the author or editor of seven books, including Joining the Mission: A Guide for (Mainly) New College Faculty, Mending a Tattered Faith: Devotions with Dickinson, and Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature. She frequently reviews contemporary African fiction in Books & Culture.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 27, 2014
I was expecting a comparison of American and African theology, somewhat like Fr. Vincent J. Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered. Instead, this is primarily an English professor’s memoir of trading Moby-Dick (her dissertation topic) for African literature.
From a Dutch-American family in Washington state, VanZanten “was an insatiable and ubiquitous reader...I read completely inappropriate books for my age.” By the time she was a PhD student at Emory (where the authors of local interest were Faulkner and O’Connor), she was starting to find South African literature more interesting than Southern. Her Dutch origins meant she felt a sense of inherited guilt about the state of South Africa. She was an assistant professor at Covenant, a Christian college, by age 26, and was able to indulge her love for Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee (the subject of her first book, published by Harvard UP) in a course devoted to South African literature.
VanZanten later moved to Calvin College and Seattle Pacific University, and also suffered through breast cancer and a divorce, but maintained her interest in African literature. She felt it “allowed us to hear voices that had been deliberately silenced as a means of denying human identity” and gave an occasion to “mourn for human sin and suffering.” Instead of being dubious about globalization, she believes Christians should embrace different cultures, becoming truly cosmopolitan – citizens of the world. “We remain ourselves, but we listen respectfully and with openness,” a dialogical approach that lets us identify with our global neighbors and widen the canon accordingly.
In the 1990s, VanZanten spent a sabbatical in South Africa, where she attended a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing. Intrigued by the concept of confession, especially how it might link Christianity and African literature, she worked for many years on a book entitled Truth and Reconciliation, which she calls her own ‘white whale’ (for Moby-Dick is a reference point throughout) – finally published in 2002. She has broadened out from South Africa to consider other writers of African descent including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “Exploring God’s gifts in our reading” is her strategy, absorbed from her second Bible: Literature Through the Eyes of Faith (1989).
This is a noteworthy look at how postcolonial literature might form part of a Christian worldview. However, I think it has been marketed as more of a theological title than it really is, and a more accurate subtitle might keep others from wandering over to it without fair warning. Still, it would be interesting to see what other topics Baker Academic’s Turning South series will consider.
From a Dutch-American family in Washington state, VanZanten “was an insatiable and ubiquitous reader...I read completely inappropriate books for my age.” By the time she was a PhD student at Emory (where the authors of local interest were Faulkner and O’Connor), she was starting to find South African literature more interesting than Southern. Her Dutch origins meant she felt a sense of inherited guilt about the state of South Africa. She was an assistant professor at Covenant, a Christian college, by age 26, and was able to indulge her love for Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee (the subject of her first book, published by Harvard UP) in a course devoted to South African literature.
VanZanten later moved to Calvin College and Seattle Pacific University, and also suffered through breast cancer and a divorce, but maintained her interest in African literature. She felt it “allowed us to hear voices that had been deliberately silenced as a means of denying human identity” and gave an occasion to “mourn for human sin and suffering.” Instead of being dubious about globalization, she believes Christians should embrace different cultures, becoming truly cosmopolitan – citizens of the world. “We remain ourselves, but we listen respectfully and with openness,” a dialogical approach that lets us identify with our global neighbors and widen the canon accordingly.
In the 1990s, VanZanten spent a sabbatical in South Africa, where she attended a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing. Intrigued by the concept of confession, especially how it might link Christianity and African literature, she worked for many years on a book entitled Truth and Reconciliation, which she calls her own ‘white whale’ (for Moby-Dick is a reference point throughout) – finally published in 2002. She has broadened out from South Africa to consider other writers of African descent including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “Exploring God’s gifts in our reading” is her strategy, absorbed from her second Bible: Literature Through the Eyes of Faith (1989).
This is a noteworthy look at how postcolonial literature might form part of a Christian worldview. However, I think it has been marketed as more of a theological title than it really is, and a more accurate subtitle might keep others from wandering over to it without fair warning. Still, it would be interesting to see what other topics Baker Academic’s Turning South series will consider.
January 13, 2015
There has been much talk in recent decades about the shift in the center of gravity in global Christianity from the west and the north to the south and the east, and books like The Next Christendom by Baylor historian Philip Jenkins have brought the conversation to a popular level. Indeed, the numbers are indisputable. While churches in much of Europe and North America have seen declining and stagnating attendance levels, respectively, the pattern does not hold elsewhere in the world. Rather, throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America there has been a remarkable degree of Christian dynamism and numerical growth, especially in Pentecostal and charismatic churches.
Whereas the Global South has long been seen as “the mission field,” the tables are increasingly being turned, and the implications for churches, missions agencies, faith-based NGOs, and Christian institutions of higher learning cannot be overstated. What can our brothers and sisters closer to Christianity’s new center of gravity teach us about our common faith? In what ways would we do well to rethink our long-held assumptions and practices?
Reading a Different Story: A Christian Scholar’s Journey from America to Africa, the second installment in a new series of books from Baker Academic called Turning South, is a memoir of Susan VanZanten’s literary, theological, and spiritual journey. The story begins in her close-knit and conservative Dutch Reformed community in Washington state, leading through various educational institutions as a student and then as a teacher, all the while discerning her calling as a literature professor. We trace the contours of her intellectual and scholarly life from an early interest in Flannery O’Connor to a dissertation on Moby-Dick and ultimately to a keen interest in the literature of South Africa.
Many of us, myself included, take for granted the ready accessibility these days of books written by authors from around the world. Among the books in my home library are works by authors with names like Achebe, Beah, Coelho, Tutu, Hosseini, Perez Esquivel, Rusesabagina, Chang, Sen, Escobar, Katongole, Satrapi, and the list goes on. Few of these required going very far off the beaten path to acquire. But such access has not always been the case, as VanZanten reminds us. Indeed, it’s one of globalization’s blessings.
VanZanten’s burgeoning personal and professional interest in South African literature had a lot to do with her Dutch Reformed upbringing and with the unavoidable apartheid-related headlines of the day. She was haunted, it seems, by the ethnic and theological roots she shared with the oppressive and racist Afrikaners, and sensed an inescapable responsibility to do something.
As a Christian scholar of literature, she became fascinated with the themes of confession that ran through South African literature. Some authors whose work she studied related tales of coerced confessions—to political crimes that may or may not have occurred—under the apartheid regime. Others wrote of their own confessions of sin in the midst of their nation’s tumult. Confession can be a tool of injustice, VanZanten suggests, but it can also be life-giving. “Properly practiced,” she writes, “confession fashions genuinely flourishing individual and communal identities.”
When the historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings got underway, confession took on new meaning entirely for those involved. Under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the TRC hearings constituted a watershed moment for post-apartheid South Africa, impacting, among many other aspects of society, the nation’s literature. Therefore, the hearings became a focal point of VanZanten’s work.
The TRC gave victims of brutality and gross human rights violations a chance to speak publicly about their horrific experiences, while also granting perpetrators an opportunity to confess to their crimes and to request amnesty. Though confessions were not necessarily Christian in any explicit sense, VanZanten notes that Christian confession shaped the reconciliation process in three crucial ways: “it provided a moral standard of good and evil, a set of images and rhetoric in which the process could be conducted, and a declaration of the centrality of community for personal identity.” VanZanten eventually expanded upon these observations in her later book, Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature.
Ultimately, VanZanten is an apologist for “Christian cosmopolitanism.” She wants believers’ allegiances to transcend geopolitical borders. Specifically, she wants us to read widely and well in order to better love God and to love our neighbors, both near and far. While she specifically appeals to her colleagues in academia, the principle applies to the rest of us just as well. “I have come to believe that Christian literary scholars should be cosmopolitans in their reading, teaching, research, and scholarship, moving from the excessive nationalism often found in literary studies to study cultural particulars found across the globe,” she writes.
While she acknowledges a continued need for the study of national identity and local traditions in the west, VanZanten urges scholars—and Christians generally—to expand our horizons. “Taking a global approach to literature allows us to balance our local identity—formed through our embodiment in a physical, social world—with a cosmopolitan identity endowed by our common creation in the image of God.”
VanZanten’s account in Reading a Different Story is intensely personal; the specific contours of her life will vary drastically from yours and mine. Further, as one whose daily work takes place outside the walls of academia, I found this book required a fair amount of “looking in.” But for those of us who read regularly—not to mention those who read (and write) book reviews—VanZanten’s invitation to turn our literary interests south is one we’d do well to heed.
- See more at: http://timhoiland.com/2014/02/reading...
Whereas the Global South has long been seen as “the mission field,” the tables are increasingly being turned, and the implications for churches, missions agencies, faith-based NGOs, and Christian institutions of higher learning cannot be overstated. What can our brothers and sisters closer to Christianity’s new center of gravity teach us about our common faith? In what ways would we do well to rethink our long-held assumptions and practices?
Reading a Different Story: A Christian Scholar’s Journey from America to Africa, the second installment in a new series of books from Baker Academic called Turning South, is a memoir of Susan VanZanten’s literary, theological, and spiritual journey. The story begins in her close-knit and conservative Dutch Reformed community in Washington state, leading through various educational institutions as a student and then as a teacher, all the while discerning her calling as a literature professor. We trace the contours of her intellectual and scholarly life from an early interest in Flannery O’Connor to a dissertation on Moby-Dick and ultimately to a keen interest in the literature of South Africa.
Many of us, myself included, take for granted the ready accessibility these days of books written by authors from around the world. Among the books in my home library are works by authors with names like Achebe, Beah, Coelho, Tutu, Hosseini, Perez Esquivel, Rusesabagina, Chang, Sen, Escobar, Katongole, Satrapi, and the list goes on. Few of these required going very far off the beaten path to acquire. But such access has not always been the case, as VanZanten reminds us. Indeed, it’s one of globalization’s blessings.
VanZanten’s burgeoning personal and professional interest in South African literature had a lot to do with her Dutch Reformed upbringing and with the unavoidable apartheid-related headlines of the day. She was haunted, it seems, by the ethnic and theological roots she shared with the oppressive and racist Afrikaners, and sensed an inescapable responsibility to do something.
As a Christian scholar of literature, she became fascinated with the themes of confession that ran through South African literature. Some authors whose work she studied related tales of coerced confessions—to political crimes that may or may not have occurred—under the apartheid regime. Others wrote of their own confessions of sin in the midst of their nation’s tumult. Confession can be a tool of injustice, VanZanten suggests, but it can also be life-giving. “Properly practiced,” she writes, “confession fashions genuinely flourishing individual and communal identities.”
When the historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings got underway, confession took on new meaning entirely for those involved. Under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the TRC hearings constituted a watershed moment for post-apartheid South Africa, impacting, among many other aspects of society, the nation’s literature. Therefore, the hearings became a focal point of VanZanten’s work.
The TRC gave victims of brutality and gross human rights violations a chance to speak publicly about their horrific experiences, while also granting perpetrators an opportunity to confess to their crimes and to request amnesty. Though confessions were not necessarily Christian in any explicit sense, VanZanten notes that Christian confession shaped the reconciliation process in three crucial ways: “it provided a moral standard of good and evil, a set of images and rhetoric in which the process could be conducted, and a declaration of the centrality of community for personal identity.” VanZanten eventually expanded upon these observations in her later book, Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature.
Ultimately, VanZanten is an apologist for “Christian cosmopolitanism.” She wants believers’ allegiances to transcend geopolitical borders. Specifically, she wants us to read widely and well in order to better love God and to love our neighbors, both near and far. While she specifically appeals to her colleagues in academia, the principle applies to the rest of us just as well. “I have come to believe that Christian literary scholars should be cosmopolitans in their reading, teaching, research, and scholarship, moving from the excessive nationalism often found in literary studies to study cultural particulars found across the globe,” she writes.
While she acknowledges a continued need for the study of national identity and local traditions in the west, VanZanten urges scholars—and Christians generally—to expand our horizons. “Taking a global approach to literature allows us to balance our local identity—formed through our embodiment in a physical, social world—with a cosmopolitan identity endowed by our common creation in the image of God.”
VanZanten’s account in Reading a Different Story is intensely personal; the specific contours of her life will vary drastically from yours and mine. Further, as one whose daily work takes place outside the walls of academia, I found this book required a fair amount of “looking in.” But for those of us who read regularly—not to mention those who read (and write) book reviews—VanZanten’s invitation to turn our literary interests south is one we’d do well to heed.
- See more at: http://timhoiland.com/2014/02/reading...
January 25, 2014
This book is part of a series called "Turning South--Christian Scholars in an Age of World Christianity." A friend of mine, Mark Noll, has just handed in a manuscript for another volume in the series.
This book is not an autobiography or spiritual memoir as such. It is an account of VanZanten's academic career taking her from her growing up in Lynden, Washington to small liberal arts Christian Colleges to Seattle Pacific University. The important aspect of this career for this book is her interest in South African literature.
My mixed reaction to this book is really my problem, not a problem with the book. I loved reading about VanZanten's growing up in the closed Dutch enclave of Lynden, Washington. Some of that resonated with my own experiences in an ethnic and religious community. I will definitely try to read more about South Africa--including re-reading Cry the Beloved Country and reading Farisani's Diary from a South African Prison. I already read online his testimony before the Truth and Reconcilation commission. This account was enough to make me pull out my credit card and give a little more to Amnesty International and the important work they do for prisoners of conscience.
I bogged down in reading about literary criticism. Once again, I was aware of a vocabulary of a field that is unfamiliar to me. I found the theme of Moby Dick somewhat irrelevant or artifically imposed on her journey. I was curious about the very, very brief mention of VanZanten's problems with breast cancer and an "emotionally draining divorce" but maybe that is material for another book or just too private to share.
I will try to get VanZanten's book on Emily Dickinson and using her poems as a basis for devotional reading. I also look forward to Mark Noll's book in this series.
This book is not an autobiography or spiritual memoir as such. It is an account of VanZanten's academic career taking her from her growing up in Lynden, Washington to small liberal arts Christian Colleges to Seattle Pacific University. The important aspect of this career for this book is her interest in South African literature.
My mixed reaction to this book is really my problem, not a problem with the book. I loved reading about VanZanten's growing up in the closed Dutch enclave of Lynden, Washington. Some of that resonated with my own experiences in an ethnic and religious community. I will definitely try to read more about South Africa--including re-reading Cry the Beloved Country and reading Farisani's Diary from a South African Prison. I already read online his testimony before the Truth and Reconcilation commission. This account was enough to make me pull out my credit card and give a little more to Amnesty International and the important work they do for prisoners of conscience.
I bogged down in reading about literary criticism. Once again, I was aware of a vocabulary of a field that is unfamiliar to me. I found the theme of Moby Dick somewhat irrelevant or artifically imposed on her journey. I was curious about the very, very brief mention of VanZanten's problems with breast cancer and an "emotionally draining divorce" but maybe that is material for another book or just too private to share.
I will try to get VanZanten's book on Emily Dickinson and using her poems as a basis for devotional reading. I also look forward to Mark Noll's book in this series.
March 14, 2014
I won this in a Good Reads / First Reads giveaway.
Curiously, this will not be a rave review. Curiously, because, in many ways, I am the perfect reader for this book: a Christian with an MA in English Literature, a former college and university English instructor who sometimes ran afoul of accepted methods and approaches through making empathy and social justice the centerpieces of my teaching, an enthusiast of Commonwealth literature. And yet -- the book is much too dry, and too scattershot, even for me. Although it's clearly aimed at a niche choir, its preaching to that choir should feel impassioned -- but it doesn't. I really enjoyed reading about Vanzanten's growth as a Christian academic, about her tussles with various theorists in the forging of her own critical lenses, and I find her arguments -- e.g. for integrated Christian scholarship over self-ghettoization, for "voice" in its collective and symphonic sense (and so for the function of such a concept of voice in fashioning respective identities) -- important. But to what end, I wonder? A gauntlet thrown down to an audience should compel that audience to wrest it up! But the book is a bit too timid, too neat for my taste. It politely suggests we transform ourselves, when it should be rousing us to do so.
Curiously, this will not be a rave review. Curiously, because, in many ways, I am the perfect reader for this book: a Christian with an MA in English Literature, a former college and university English instructor who sometimes ran afoul of accepted methods and approaches through making empathy and social justice the centerpieces of my teaching, an enthusiast of Commonwealth literature. And yet -- the book is much too dry, and too scattershot, even for me. Although it's clearly aimed at a niche choir, its preaching to that choir should feel impassioned -- but it doesn't. I really enjoyed reading about Vanzanten's growth as a Christian academic, about her tussles with various theorists in the forging of her own critical lenses, and I find her arguments -- e.g. for integrated Christian scholarship over self-ghettoization, for "voice" in its collective and symphonic sense (and so for the function of such a concept of voice in fashioning respective identities) -- important. But to what end, I wonder? A gauntlet thrown down to an audience should compel that audience to wrest it up! But the book is a bit too timid, too neat for my taste. It politely suggests we transform ourselves, when it should be rousing us to do so.
February 5, 2014
Reading A Different Story
Susan Vanzanten
Copyright 2014
Reading A Different Story starts out with the authors growing up years, and the steps of faith she took, it talks about memories of when JFK was shot when she was in First grade and about when Neal Armstrong walked on the moon a few years later. Susan talks about her growth in faith, how she learns that her intellectual search does not mean she can not have faith in Christ.
Susan Vanzanten goes into detail on her studies in litterature in graduate school and how that influneced her life. She also goes on to tell how the study of litterature itself helped shape her face in a way. As well as her work at different Christian Colleges, not only in the U.S, but in Africa as well.
Although the authors idea of Christian Theology is a bit different from mine and that is okay, because all Christians are not going to think the same, I give this book five stars, for the well thought out, well researched book...
Susan Vanzanten
Copyright 2014
Reading A Different Story starts out with the authors growing up years, and the steps of faith she took, it talks about memories of when JFK was shot when she was in First grade and about when Neal Armstrong walked on the moon a few years later. Susan talks about her growth in faith, how she learns that her intellectual search does not mean she can not have faith in Christ.
Susan Vanzanten goes into detail on her studies in litterature in graduate school and how that influneced her life. She also goes on to tell how the study of litterature itself helped shape her face in a way. As well as her work at different Christian Colleges, not only in the U.S, but in Africa as well.
Although the authors idea of Christian Theology is a bit different from mine and that is okay, because all Christians are not going to think the same, I give this book five stars, for the well thought out, well researched book...
June 29, 2015
A great read, even for the non-religious.
March 1, 2014
I know the author so it was interesting to read about her life and career.
May 12, 2014
A literature professor describes her growth from an Anglo-focused teacher to a scholar of "cosmopolitan Christianity." An uncommonly clear argument-through-memoir.
May 17, 2024
2.5 stars
This is a sort of memoir detailing the author's career path… it reads a bit like an extended résumé. I think most people will find it rather dull. Those who are interested in pursuing a career in academia might find it helpful in deciding if it's actually a good fit or not.
Note: There are spoilers for various classic works, including Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Melville's Moby Dick, and Adichie's short story “The Shivering.”
This is a sort of memoir detailing the author's career path… it reads a bit like an extended résumé. I think most people will find it rather dull. Those who are interested in pursuing a career in academia might find it helpful in deciding if it's actually a good fit or not.
Note: There are spoilers for various classic works, including Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Melville's Moby Dick, and Adichie's short story “The Shivering.”
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews