Speaking of Sin by Barbara Brown Taylor

Speaking of Sin Reviews

• 
  Paul

  Our priest referenced this book in his sermon the first Sunday of Lent, and it sounded like it would be a good read for the season. And it was! Barbara Brown Taylor is of course an Episcopal priest herself and an excellent writer. This short book is essentially three connected sermons on how Christians, both liberal and conservative, have lost a meaningful language of sin and redemption, and how (and why) we can recover it.
  
  For liberals like me, it's challenging because she critiques our tendency to cloak sin in the language of medicine – a disease that we all have, and which is therefore not something for which an individual can truly take the blame. For conservatives like those in the tradition I was raised, the challenge is to move away from the language of law – where each individual stands condemned, with no discussion of the Bible's focus on systemic sins like injustice against the poor.
  
  Taylor argues we need to recover a robust concept of sin as both individual and corporate, and along with that recover the notion of penance as a key step on the path to redemption. Without these notions, she argues, we cannot truly experience the grace and forgiveness – the freedom, the salvation – found in following Jesus.
  
  Lent is coming to a close for 2017; there might be just enough time to read it before Easter. But even if you don't get it done by then, it's well worth reading any time of the year. It will challenge you and maybe even provoke you to change how you think of your own missteps.
• 
  Katie Eichler

  Very helpful to me in understanding and being better able to articulate the problem of evil.
• 
  Rachel Fredericks

  Sin, salvation, justification, repentance, penance, transgression. All words that make my insides squirm because of the way they have been used by the church of my youth, when I was being taught the foundations of my faith right alongside an unhealthy dose of hatred for my sinful flesh and that of others. This book has helped to right some of that wrong. I will likely come back to it again and again.
• 
  heidi

  As I have come to expect from Brown Taylor, this slim little book is packed full of concepts that require me to slow down and think about what she is saying. I really enjoy the way she approaches a thought from several different angles.
  
  "People hear the guilt coming and they leave the room. They are tired of being judged and threatened by Christians who say"love" and do fear."
  
  Also, after years of liberal-arts education, she gave me the most useful definition of "post-modern" I've ever seen:
  "My own working definition of it is that the modern age is over-the age in which we believed in the power of the state, or the academy, or the church to bring out the best in us. In the age just past, nationalism has brought us Hitler, science has brought us the atom bomb, and religion has brought us some really awful television programming, not to mention apartheid or the civil war in Northern Ireland. Humanity has turned out to he hard to perfect, and the old structures we relied on to do so have let us down."
  
  "The threat of sin and the promise of salvation sound too much like part of the old control mechanism for keeping people in line, which has failed even at the highest echelons of church leadership."
  
  Read if: You are interested in chewy and humane theological writing. You have a lot of patience for thinking.
  
  Skip if: You are uninterested in theology.
  
  Also read:
  
  The Amber Spyglass for a mirror-universe vision of sin which involves all the post-modern thinking Brown Taylor is talking about.
• 
  Jeremy

  Based on my reading of scripture, it seems entirely possible that Jesus might define salvation as recovery from illness or addiction, as forgiveness of debt, as peace between old enemies, as shared food in time of famine, or as justice for the poor. These are outbreaks of health in a sin-sick word. Jesus saves because he shows us how to multiply such outbreaks.
  
  A small book that covers a lot of ground on the unpopular topic of sin. Three things stood out for me: (1) Her explanation and rejection of the medicine/law paradigms and the need to leave room for paradox. (2) The desire for meaning in our current age shapes how we understand salvation which is different than the context of our parents and grandparents. (3) Righteousness is a matter of daily practice (action). The important thing is not that we always hit the mark but rather that we keep at it.
• 
  Katherine Wren

  As always, Barbara Brown Taylor's books never disappoint. I'll have a lot to think over for a long time to come. The concepts she discusses in this series of three related talks or sermons would have been extremely useful to me when I stumbled through faith after leaving the Baptist church. The language she uses to describe sin, repentance, penance, and salvation, are worth reading no matter what your faith is or is not.
• 
  Greg Turner

  The book marvelously and effectively reclaims on old word that nowadays is often regarded as offensive at worst and at the very best too antiquated to taken seriously by contemporary minded people.
  
  I would recommend this book to anyone who is intentional regarding faithful effective communication of the Christian faith within postmodern culture.
• 
  Caleb Wesley

  Important work for reclaiming parts of traditional Christian language that has lost meaning in the institution of the Church.
• 
  Lee

  "Sin" and "repentance" are words that have fallen out of favor in our postmodern and secularizing age, perhaps understandably so given how they've often been deployed in ways that have actually upheld social structures marked by injustice and iniquity, but Episcopal priest Brown Taylor says that there is no adequate replacement language for the reality they describe, and we are inevitably the poorer for our attempts to avoid them.
  
  Separation from God, "missing the mark" in our relationships with others, is a common struggle of our daily lives. To successfully work at transforming ourselves we need to be able to recognize and confess our sin and accept God's grace, but that in itself does not get the job done. Brown Taylor notes that it seems easier to accept living with guilt and punishment for our sins that put us out of right relationship than it is to do the work of repentance that would bring us into right relationship (nodding head time in self-aware agreement with that point). Our churches should function as places of transformation, with a community that assists us in the work of real, actual life change, but Brown Taylor worries that this sort of church is hard to find.
  
  Pull out quotes for me:
  
  "I am not sure what the word repentance means anymore. Words without actions do not seem very meaningful to me, and individual good intentions without community support to back them up seem doomed to fail. There is something powerful about kneeling with other people and saying true things about our failure to live up to God's high call, but if all we do when it is over is climb in our cars and go our separate ways, then I wonder if God really cares."
  
  "To use Hall's language, the church exists so that God has a community in which to save people from meaninglessness, by reminding them who they are and what they are for. The church exists so that God has a place to point people toward a purpose as big as their capabilities, and to help them identify all the ways they flee from that high call. The church exists so that people have a community in which they may confess their sin - their own turning away from life, whatever form that destructiveness may take for them - as well as a community that will support them to turn back again. The church exists so that people have a place where they may repent of their fear, their hardness of heart, their isolation and loss of vision, and where - having repented - they may be restored to fullness of life.
  
  In a life of faith so conceived, God's grace is not simply the infinite supply of divine forgiveness upon which hopeless sinners depend. Grace is also the mysterious strength God lends human beings who commit themselves to the work of transformation. To repent is both to act from that grace and to ask for more of it, in order to follow Christ into the startling freedom of new life."
  
  "I do not believe that there is any adequate substitute for this language. But in order to keep it alive, each of us must do our work - not only the work of diving down deep into human experience to find the realities the words describe, but also the work of bringing these words to life by clothing them in our own flesh. There is no reason why anyone should ever believe our talk of God's transforming power unless they can also see that transformation taking place in us - and through us, in the world. We are the people God has chosen to embody the gospel. Our lives are God's sign language in a sin-sick world, and God has promised us the grace we need to point the way home."
• 
  Rev. Linda

  From the back cover of "Speaking of Sin":Barbara Brown Taylor brings her fresh perspective to a cluster of words that often cause us discomfort and have widely fallen into neglect: sin, damnation, repentance, penance, and salvation. She asks, Why, then, should we speak of sin anymore? Because we believe that God means to redeem the world through us. Abandoning the language of sin will not make sin go away. Human beings will continue to experience alienation, deformation, damnation and death no matter what we call them. Abandoning the language will simply leave us speechless before them, and increase our denial of their presence in our lives. Ironically, it will also weaken the language of grace, since the full impact of forgiveness cannot be felt apart from the full impact of what has been forgiven. Contrary to the prevailing view, Taylor calls sin a helpful, hopeful word. Naming our sins, she contends, enables us to move from guilt to grace. In recovering this lost language of salvation in our worship and in the fabric of our individual lives, we have an opportunity to take part in the divine work of redemption."
• 
  M Christopher

  I read this slim volume (72 pages of actual text) in an afternoon with time out for my Monday nap. I'm sure I'll read it again. Rev. Taylor, the well-known Episcopal priest and teacher, does an excellent job in leading the reader to consider why traditional words and concepts like "sin," "repentance," "penance," and "salvation" are actually still necessary to the spiritual path of wholeness. The prose is simple but compelling. While the book is aimed at her fellow preachers, Rev. Taylor has given us a work that any lay person, indeed, any person with or without a connection to Christianity, will find understandable and useful.
  
  So, why will I read it again? As we say down home, "this'll preach." It's not been that long since Rev. Taylor was named one of America's best preachers and this book displays her gift. I'll be reading it again to mine it for my own sermons some Lenten season very soon.
• 
  Will Waller

  Superb. Excellent. Fantastic. This little nugget spells out sin's place in the world and not just the hearts of people. It does a great job of eliminating the liberal tendencies to no-fault people for their sin and conservative's full-fault of sin. The book also describes how institutions can become tainted by sin, a job done by few and by none as well as Taylor. This is a quick, one day read, but it'll have me thumbing through it again and again. Would recommend this to anyone with a church background.
• 
  Kaye

  The author offers a compelling argument for why the language involved with sin (sin, transgressions, etc.) is necessary for understanding and accepting salvation, as well as how it could be translated into our daily lives. One section that was particularly good was on the subject of penance; what it is, and what it could mean for us.
• 
  Joey Dye

  This is a quick read but many great reflections on sin, confession, and repentance. This is a great book to read at the beginning or during Lent as we start the process of self- and communal-examination in preparation for Easter. Highly recommended.
• 
  Carol

  I picked this up because I have really enjoyed another book from this author. There are always wonderful nuggets and passages in her writing, and good fodor for thinking about how you live your life. 3 stars in comparison to other of her books that I have read.
• 
  Judy

  Realistic and transformative. Much of the language of the Christian faith is rarely used and seldom understood: sin,salvation,confession, penance, sanctification, justification, righteousness. If we don't use and know these words, what are their substitutes? Only 72 pages - highly readable.
• 
  Frank

  The noted preacher's book on sin was yet another thoughtful read.
• 
  Avary Doubleday

  Interesting discussion of the language of sin, forgiveness, pennance, salvation.
• 
  Elsa

  I wanted more from this, though I'm not sure what I hoped to find. Still, it's BBT so quite good.
• 
  Heather

  Great book that really makes you think about the meaning of sin.
• 
  Fabienne Bogle

  Ms. Taylor is very insightful and I love the way she writes.
• 
  Sara

  I love Taylor's language and way of conveying theological principles in practical, livable ways. I just wish I could live like she preaches :)
• 
  Audrey

  Great for a church book discussion group. The title sells itself! BBT is almost aways excellent. No hellfire & damnation here. Grace abounds!