Since summer officially started a few weeks ago, I’ve already finished the first three titles. If you add your books to the comment section, you will be entered in a drawing to win ten of my original photo cards. If you subscribe to my site within the next ten days, you get two entries!
1. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, N. T. Wright. This book has blown me away. It’s impossible to summarize it in a few sentences but this passage will give you the flavor of Surprised. “Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.”
2. If Only: Letting Go of Regret, Michelle Van Loon. If you are not familiar with Van Loon’s writing, I encourage you to follow her work on Her.meneutics. She’s smart, funny, pastoral, and doesn’t take herself too seriously. “If we have been called to follow Jesus out of the prison of our regrets, then he will use all things—including our poor choices and the painful ways in which the sins of others have affected our lives—for his redemptive purposes.” (Read my longer review here.)
3. A Beautiful Disaster: Finding Hope and the Midst of Brokenness, Marlena Graves. This is Graves’s first book and I already am eagerly anticipating her next. “Our God-bathed wilderness experiences have two results: the opening of our eyes and the unclogging of the pores of our souls.” (Read my longer review here.)
4. Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison. I am half-way through this offering and they definitely have me hooked. Smith and Pattison are thoughtful and willing to topple many a sacred cow. “To imagine a slow church is to trust that God has reconciled all things in Christ, to resist worship of the nation, and to embody our call to be peacemakers, bearing witness to God’s reconciliation in Christ beginning in our own particular places.”
5. Growing a Feast: the Chronicle of a Farm to Table Meal, Kurt Timmermeister. The author, a farmer/chef/cheese maker on Vashon Island (off the coast of Seattle) describes all of the behind the scenes work that went into preparing a feast for twenty friends. Consider it a book version of the movie, Babette’s Feast.
6. All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting, Jennifer Senior. I disagree with the author’s title but since I am always curious about what others are offering for those of us who are parents, I grabbed this from the library. From the book cover, “Senior deconstructs the kinds of experiences that all parents have but few parents talk about.”
7. The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kid. “This fictionalized account of the pioneering abolitionist Sarah Grimke and the slave girl she received on her 11th birthday is an important addition to this year’s spate of works examining the immense and lasting evil wrought by slavery.” (From Karen Swallow Prior on the Her.meneutics’ summer reading list. Also worth checking out.)
8. Blessed and Beautiful: Multiethnic Churches and the Preaching that Sustains Them, Lisa Washington Lamb. From the publisher’s website, “Why does the church in the United States still find it so difficult to integrate across racial and ethnic divides? In Blessed and Beautiful Lisa Lamb trains her sights on one often overlooked facet of forging life together: the magnetic power of shared memories…. While keenly aware of the complex dynamics involved, Lamb ultimately gives pastors and other church leaders a glimmer of hope as they seek to build reconciled communities of faith.
9. Women, Leadership, and the Bible, Natalie Wilson Eastman. Also from the Wipf & Stock website, “What do you believe about women’s roles in church leadership? Should women lead groups that include men? Should women preach? Should women be ordained? More importantly, why do you believe what you believe?”
10. Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith, Jen Pollock Michel. “We often feel the urge to hide our longings, especially in the church. Through her own story of fear, loss and God’s goodness, Jen Michel stirs us to recover and reshape these desires in light of the kingdom of God,” by Rebekah Lyons.
Happy reading! Don’t forget to subscribe and add your titles below.
Just finished one with a different kind of message of hope and challenge: Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys.” It tells about the young Canadian exec at RBC who finally dug in to figure out why it was that as soon as he hit “Buy” the share prices changed and most of the available shares vanished. He reached the point where he realized he was in fact the only person in the North American financial markets who understood what was happening and “if not me, who?” This is history in the making: his team opened the new IEX stock exchange in December 2013 hoping to put an end to High Frequency Trading, which siphons off hundreds of billions annually from stock market investors. That’s your 401(k) and mine. The biblical term for what’s been happening is “defrauding others” or perhaps “putting a stumbling block in front of the blind” — since not even the people running the markets understood how they were being operated.
Not to be too dense but is it fiction or are those our lives he’s talking about?