Frank A. Thomas: The Choice

When my friend, the right reverend professor doctor Baker, loaned me this book, it was with the caveat, "He needed an editor like you when he wrote this, but I think you'll find some good stuff in here."  She was right on both counts.

Perhaps it's my unfamiliarity with the dialectic of the African-American preaching style, but this collection of sermons seemed better suited to being preached than to being read.  On an objective level, the typos, misspellings, and malapropisms at least are of the sort that I would have abolished quickly and mercilessly.

But she was also right that I found "some good stuff", a succinct and elegant framework for describing the sort of thoughts and struggles that have been forefront in my mind this year.  It is no surprise that I found an affinity with Thomas' paradigm.  Not only does he speak from a Protestant perspective that 30 years made very familiar to me.  He also speaks from a familiarity with transformational training, and his approach to agency, power, and victimization all align nicely with my own. 

Whether the central framework, that of inside-out vs. outside-in living, is his own innovation, cribbed from somewhere else, or (most likely) somewhere in between the two, it is exactly the sort of thing that has been occupying me lately.  Starting with Murakami's exploration of selfness in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, and continuing through Kristeva's distinction of the subject self and the object self, I have been forming a crystal of understanding in which Thomas' inside/outside living is the latest, but not the final, ingredient.