Books and Stuff…
My goal this year is to finish all the books I’ve bought in the last year and not buy any more until I do.
I have already failed in half of my goals…
I also took a detour to read something free…Karl Barth’s classic essay “The Strange New World Of The Bible”.
Now, to be honest, I understand about a quarter of what I read when I read Barth…and that is probably overestimating myself.
What I do understand blows me away…
“For, besides giving to every one of us what he rightly deserves—to one, much, to another, something, to a third, nothing—it leaves us no rest whatever, if we are in earnest, once with our shortsighted eyes and awkward fingers we have found the answer in it that we deserve. Such an answer is something but, as we soon realize, not everything. It may satisfy us for a few years, but we simply cannot be content with it forever.
Ere long the Bible says to us, in a manner candid and friendly enough, with regard to the”versions” we make of it: “These may be you, but they are not I! They may perhaps suit you, meeting the demands of your thought and temperament, of your era and your ‘circle,’ of your religious or philosophical theories. You wanted to be mirrored in me, and now you have really found in me your own reflection. But now I bid you come seek me, as well. Seek what is here.” It is the Bible itself, it is the straight inexorable logic of its on-march which drives us out beyond ourselves and invites us, without regard to our worthiness or unworthiness, to reach for the last highest answer, in which all is said that can be said, although we can hardly understand and only stammeringly express it. And that answer is: A new world, the world of God.”
I commend the whole essay to you…
I did finish…
Five Views On Biblical Inerrancy
The Rise And Fall Of Dispensationalism
I’m currently reading…
The Way Of The Desert Elders: How the Wisdom Of Ancient Christians Sustains Us Today
Glimmerings: Letters On Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian
Your turn…
What are you currently reading or listening to?
So far this month, I’ve read the following:
Barclay, John M. G. Paul and the Gift. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2015.
Leclerc, Diane, and Brent Peterson, with John Nielson, Julie Schmidt, and Aisling Zweigle. The Back Side of the Cross: An Atonement Theology for the Abused and Abandoned. Foreword by Lynn Bohecker. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022.
Gorman, Michael J. The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant: A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014.
Hodgson, Dorothy L. Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture: From Customary Law to Human Rights in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
And I am currently in this one:
Gorman, Michael J., ed. Scripture and Its Interpretation: A Global Ecumenical Introduction to the Bible. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2017.
I’m reading “An Altar in the World” by Barbara Brown Taylor, and “Little Alleluias” by Mary Oliver. I find both compelling, because they look for and find God through practices of attending to the what goes on beyond church walls, both in nature and humanity, and I’m in terrible need of that wisdom.
Joshua,
That is a hell of a list for a month!
Tell me more about Gorman…
Robert F,
“An Altar in the World” is on my list this year…
I’ve read “The Sin of Certainty”, and liked it, but I don’t like that title. The word sin has been thrown around far too casually and carelessly, and I think that, though it might not have been as attention-getting, another word would have been truer.
Robert F,
I like the title…because I’m convinced that the desire for certainty is one of the roots of the evangelical issues…
I’m working on “The Peaceable Kingdom” by Jan de Hartog. It’s an historical fiction novel regarding the history of the Quakers. Back when I was trying to figure out what Christianity was about, I read a lot of historical novels with religious themes. I was in middle school when I read this book (yeah, I was plenty nerdy-I loved Michener, Uris, Wallace, and other authors of big, fat novels).
I’m reading/listening to Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxes. I haven’t been very familiar with his life or work – read a little of Life Together last summer. His thoughts are timely and apply to my experience today
Posted on the wrong thread!
Geoffrey R. Treloar, Lightfoot the Historian (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998)
Anglican Biblical Interpretation in the Nineteenth Century, ed. J. Garry (Leiden: Brill, 2023)
Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
I just finished reading ‘The Fed up Man of Faith’ by Shmuley Boteach (non-Christian).
My current reading has been mostly fiction and technical/engineering books.
I currently have a backlog science fiction books on my list. Most recently I have been reading the Safehold Series by David Weber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safehold
Considering current Evangelicals’ anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-vaxx attitudes the “Church” in these books seems eerily familiar.
As for theology books, commentaries, bibles, etc, I have a bunch in storage where they will remain until I get them recycled into cardboard and paperboard.
I haven’t been able to read too many books lately, but the last book I read was The Great Desert Escape by Keith Warren Lloyd.
It’s the true story of the December 1944 escape of 25 German POWs from Camp Papago, which was the largest Allied POW camp in North America.
They tunneled to the bank of the canal, hoping to follow the canal to the Salt River. There they planned to steal boats or build rafts and follow the Salt River to the Colorado River down to Mexico and the Gulf of California.
When they found out the hard way what constitutes a “river” in the American southwest, they scattered. Four of them turned themselves in that day. By the end of the month, all had turned themselves in or been captured.
There’s probably a spiritual lesson here. They daydreamed about just floating down the river, imagining the bliss of going their own way. Instead, they found a dry, rocky streambed that took them nowhere, and returned to where they belonged.
The former site of the camp is now split between the north end of Papago Park ( where the Phoenix Zoo is), a National Guard station, and housing tracts. There’s now a bike path along that canal which I ride often, running behind homes. There’s a plaque on the ground, that just looks like a manhole cover until you stop to read it, where the tunnel exit was. You can find it on Google Maps under Papago POW escape monument.
John in AZ,
I’ve lived here in AZ for 22 years and never knew about that.