Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 27:1 (Winter 2013)
Article: Book Review: "Non-Prophet Murders" By Becky Wooley (Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock, 2010)
Author: William David Spencer

PP 27:1 (Winter 2013) p. 27

Book Review: Non-Prophet Murders
By Becky Wooley (Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock, 2010)

William David Spencer

William David Spencer, editor of Priscilla Papers and author of Mysterium and Mystery: The Clerical Crime Novel (Southern Illinois Univ.), which is recognized as the definitive work on fictional detecting clergy, is Ranked Adjunct Full Professor of Theology and the Arts at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Boston campus and co-author of “The Timeless to the Trinity” (http://blogs.christianpost.com/scriptural-truths). His new mystery novel, Name in the Papers, is forthcoming in e-serial form from Trestle Press.

In her biography Fighting Angel, one of the most famous and disaffected missionary children of them all, the Nobel Prize–winning Pearl Buck, tells the sad tale of her longsuffering grandmother. After years of cooking, cleaning, serving for an unappreciative husband and set of sons, one day, she simply sat down on the porch. She had had enough. No amount of demanding, threatening, pleading, or cajoling could ever cause her to lift a finger to serve again.

As a journalist and former church secretary, pastor’s wife and veteran of fifteen congregations and seven university ministries with her pastor husband, Becky Wooley, as her biographical sketch assures us, “knows where the bodies are buried.” She peoples this first novel in her projected “Grit and Grace Mystery series” with a cohort of women very much like Pearl Buck’s grandmother.

For those who wonder what it is like to grow up in an ultraconservative Christian church, Becky Wooley is the expert. While her novel is clearly a great part over-the-top satire of fundamentalist culture, like all the best denizens of that genre, the book is profoundly serious at its core. She understands that, for many of us so reared, such an environment becomes our point of reference in the world—what we use for a plumb line to measure anything else we meet in thought and practice. No matter how much we develop or how far we stray ecclesiastically within the Christian community, cultural conservatism was home, and it retains an a priori claim on our thinking. This pull is so great that many do not escape it at all.

This is not to lay a blanket condemnation on fundamentalism as totally unacceptable and needing a Surgeon General’s warning that it can be hazardous to one’s health. Orthodox Christian fundamentalism honors Jesus as the sole way to God, upholds the Bible as the only completely reliable written source about Jesus, and reminds us that the world pollutes us in ways we often do not perceive, so we should all be more aware than we often are, especially with how our children are being leavene...