Theology: Rainbow Spirit Theology by the Rainbow Spirit Elders (2nd edition).

Last August my husband and I took our first-ever trip Down Under and were delighted with pretty much everything we found. It was in part due to the surprise of having a perfectly intelligible common language, common colonial British roots, and common form of government, and yet having such an entirely different texture than the U.S. (This is probably my polite way of saying, Gosh, it wasn’t like America, as I the American just assumed it would be!) One of the most striking things was flying from directly north over the entire continent before hitting the large cities that stretch along the south coast. It’s easy to look at that vast flat desert and think it’s “empty.” But as we learned in our time there, the Aboriginal peoples over the course of maybe as much as 60,000 years mapped out every inch of it and passed on their knowledge in the form of song (bonus book recommendation: Songlines by Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, about this beyond-extraordinary encoding of knowledge). Which leads to what happened when explorers from the north and west showed up about 200 years ago: a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale. I think it’s right to see it as a tragedy even before the awful moral horrors set in, because there is no way an oral, nomadic culture can survive encounter with a literary, industrial culture and not come out the loser, even if the latter had better wisdom and restraint. And, well, they didn’t. Including many missionaries, who could only see idolatry in indigenous religious practices. And so finally, in Rainbow Spirit Theology, there is a first effort at a response from the Aboriginal church reclaiming their indigenous culture and spirituality under the guidance of Christ. Most Aborigines today are Christian; they don’t see a conflict between who they have been these many thousands of years and their engrafting into the body of Christ, but they do bear a critique for how the gospel was brought to them. If you’ve never read a missional critique of this type, Rainbow Spirit Theology is an excellent entry point. But it should also be allowed to stand in all its uniqueness. I don’t think it cross-applies nearly as well to missions in modern Japan, for example, which has its own unique set of problems quite unlike those in Australia.

Cookbook: The Food Saver’s A–Z: The Essential Cornersmith Kitchen Companion, by Alex Elliott-Howery and Jaimee Edwards.

Another Australian find, by a couple of cooking teachers, responding in the most practical way to the problem of food waste at home. (My snooping in other people’s kitchens confirms how much perfectly good food goes bad before anyone notices.) This is a combination of encyclopedia and cookbook, organized by ingredient. Do you have a random handful of rather wilted herbs? Or odds and ends of cheese? Or not quite enough dried fruit, nuts, or seeds to make anything coherent out of? Or a section of winter squash that is going to sprout fungus if you don’t do something quick? Then just look it up, and you will find a wondrous array of options to make gold out of lead (including lots of pickles and chutneys). The only problem is that I am so enthralled with this book that I tend to buy fresh at the store the ingredients they are exhorting me to use up, just to try their suggestions. But it has definitely rescued a fair number of foodstuffs that otherwise would’ve ended up in the bin.

Novel: Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey.

Peter Carey is a well-respected literary author from Australia, and this book did so well as to be made into a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett (which I haven’t seen, so I can’t advise on it). It was one of several Australian novels I read on our trip (the others were My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay—I enjoyed them very much, too), and I commend it here for, not surprisingly, its religious content. It’s hard to imagine Carey sharing the religious conviction he presents in his characters, and yet he nevertheless portrays it humanely and sympathetically, even as it harms those it has also empowered and animated. Be warned, this is a book to take at a leisurely pace, as you might a Dickens novel. If nothing else, look up Prince Rupert’s Drops—a phenomenon I learned about from the book, and as good a metaphor as any for the endurance of the human soul, and its limits.