Life and death

Karen Mason’s Preventing Suicide: A Handbook for Pastors, Chaplains and Pastoral Counselors (IVP, 2014) is exactly what it claims, which means church offices or libraries without a copy should get one. Mason, a psychologist and counseling professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, starts by showing that in some worldviews suicide is destiny or duty, and in others a matter of honor, a rational choice, or an opportunity for political protest. She also tells us that in recent years, according to the World Health Organization, five times as many persons have died by suicide than by warfare. (More men than women commit suicide, although more women try, and the suicide percentage is higher among whites than among African-Americans or Asian-Americans.)

Mason writes well—“Some psychologists pluck blackberries without seeing God”—and shatters numerous suicide myths, such as “real Christians do not experience suicidal thoughts … people who are suicidal are just trying to get attention …depressed people should just ‘buck up’ … people who are suicidal don’t tell anyone … if someone wants to kill himself, there’s nothing I can do.” Most persons who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge die, so we don’t know what their last thoughts were, but one who survived, Ken Baldwin, later said that as soon as he jumped, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

Mason offers good specifics on how to help someone in a suicide crisis and help those who survive suicide attempts. She notes that those in media can “prevent contagion and suicide clusters” by avoiding detailed descriptions of the suicide method, oversimplification of suicide causes, or any suggestion (as was frequent after actor Robin Williams’ suicide) the deceased is now at peace. Mason suggests pastoral caregivers discuss theology and grapple with suffering: She does not point specifically to “prosperity gospel” talk, but notes that the “primary issues suicidal people discuss with their pastor are their lack of Christian joy. … Christians often seem puzzled by their suffering.”

If we understood that suffering is part of the Christian life, we wouldn’t be surprised and sometimes stunned by adversity. And if we understood the Bible’s teaching that we often need suffering to advance spiritually, we’d welcome difficulty as part of God’s grace. As Abraham Kuyper put it, if a Christian “must go through a period when God puts him in the smelting furnace, or makes finer cuttings on the diamond of his soul, then, though tears make his eyes glisten, he will nobly bear up in the exaltation of faith; for then it is certain that he is in need of this, that it can not be otherwise, and that if it did go otherwise, his life would be a failure forever.”

Short stops

Brian Fisher’s Abortion: The Ultimate Exploitation of Women (Morgan James, 2014) offers useful facts and perspective, along with a true subtitle—Men Started It. Men Oppress With It. Men Can End It—that has feminist appeal.

In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices, edited by Todd Peppers and Artemus Ward (University of Virginia Press, 2012), includes essays by former clerks and academic court-watchers. The book includes stories about giants like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Louis Brandeis, and Benjamin Cardozo, and justices of the past six decades: Earl Warren, William Brennan, Arthur Goldberg, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell Jr., William Rehnquist, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sadly, many of the accounts are adulatory and throw more light on hobbies—Hugo Black wanted clerks who would play tennis with him—than worldviews.

Those who want to understand how Blackmun wrote an opinion so poorly researched and argued that even pro-abortion lawyers disparage it, will be better off getting Clarke Forsythe’s Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade (Encounter, 2013), which shows how clerks for Justice Harry Blackmun, with little knowledge of abortion history but a high ideological quotient, influenced the opinion that condemned millions of unborn children. (See “Arrogant power,” Jan. 25, 2014.) —M.O.