[Oe List ...] Review of BROTHER JOE on Amazon.com

[John Cock]

A review of BROTHER JOE: A 20th Century Apostle, biography by Bishop James
K. Mathews
 
5 stars: "Compelling, challenging, and life changing"
 
See Review:
http://www.amazon.com/Brother-Joe-A-20th/dp/0976389215/sr=1-2/qid=1156898434
/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-4135026-1865512?ie=UTF8&s=books
 
By Wayne M. Jones, August 29, 2006
	 
Joe Mathews liked to scare people, though his intent was to evoke a
liberating sense of freedom and a weighty, awesome sense of responsibility.
Being challenged to become a significant participant in "bending history" in
the twentieth century, and in the process to discover a new, profound
context for a meaningful existence in community can be exhilirating,
downright dangerous vis á vis established norms, and a very scary experience
indeed. 

That, in essence, was what Joe Mathews was about. I know—I was there, and it
happened to me. And so were thousands of others whose lives Joe touched,
directly and indirectly, before and long after his sudden, untimely death
from cancer in 1977 at age 66.

Now, almost 30 years later, we finally have the gift of a biographical
account of Joe’s life and impact on the inhabited earth, penned at the age
of 93 by the ultimate living authority on the Mathews family, his younger
brother ‘Ken’, United Methodist Bishop James K. Mathews, a giant in the
church who knew Gandhi, collaborated in India with E. Stanley Jones, and
married his daughter Eunice!

Don’t be disappointed by the fundamental elusiveness of his subject or the
failure of one book to wrap up a definitive account of Brother Joe’s
contribution to humanity. 

It is enough that we now can know much more about how Joe Mathews’ global
consciousness was shaped by his family, his theological training, his
military experience, and his phenomenal struggle to break through the limits
of a clouded and irrelevant religious tradition. 

What you won’t read here is much about Joe’s inner journey of spiritual
doubt and chaos in the trenches of WWII as he faced the breakdown of all the
religious metaphors that he had been raised to believe in. Joe wasn’t one to
flood you with an overwhelming sense of his inner spiritual muck. What he
chose to share was the incredible spiritual fruit that came, painfully, from
his solitary wrestling with the angel of his destiny.

Dare we do any less than that for the sake of our brothers and sisters on
this planet?

Note: a companion volume of Joe Mathews’ personal ‘talks’ and essays, titled
Bending History, was published in 2005, and is available at
www.resurgencepublishing.com. And there will be more to come as we pursue
the rediscovery of this 20th century Apostle.