Fitz’s Book Review: How Far to the Promised Land by Esau McCaulley

In How Far to the Promised Land, NT Professor and NYT Columnist Esau McCaulley gets personal. He shares his family’s story: a drug-addicted father, a single Mom who survived brain cancer, playing basketball with drug dealers, college in a dorm with confederate flags. He even works that story backward as far as his great-grandparents. It is a moving, compelling account. What makes the book so powerful is the way McCaulley interprets it. His own family story becomes a way of telling the bigger story of Black experience in America. “A good narrative—a Black one, at least—is not owned by any single individual; it is, instead, the story of a people.”  He also passes his family story through a theological lens, revealing how this story is the human story, and how it is filled with purpose. “Resurrection infuses our lives with meaning. It suggests that who and what we are echoes into eternity.” It is Esau’s life, but God is at the center of it.  In each generation God speaks, culminating in his own call to ministry. Brokenness and beauty are mixed together in our world, and Esau shows us both.