This is not really on topic regarding attentiveness, etc., but if I may, I thought I’d take advantage of this blog to ask for ideas. Tim and I are in a small Christian faculty reading group that meets weekly for an hour to discuss a book. We’ve been working our way through Kathleen Norris’ Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith; before that we read Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. We’re currently looking to select a new book to read. The goal is to find something that leads to fruitful discussion (Amazing Grace did; The Reason for God not so much, although it is a good book). We typically aim to read 15-30 pgs./week, and then discuss it for 45-60 mins. Any greatest hits you would recommend? It doesn’t necessarily need to be written from a Christian perspective, but should be something that people from different disciplines can understand, and should lead to interesting discussion.
Book suggestions?
October 26th, 2009 | Uncategorized
4 comments ↓
Are there Christian cookbooks out there? 🙂
But seriously… the complete antithesis of the above, would be Piper’s “A Hunger for God”. It approaches the concept of fasting from a deeper level than any other book on fasting that I’ve seen… not that I’m a connoisseur of the genre. It wanders a bit, especially it’s soap box chapter on abortion. But otherwise it’s as good as any of the other books he’s written… just on an unpopular topic that needs to be more practiced.
I wrote a summary of this one for a faculty book club that I was a part of…
A theology of reading: the hermeneutics of love, by Alan Jacobs
Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton college.
This book seeks to go beyond simply reading books in a “charitable” manner; it certainly touches on a large number of other books and authors to make its point. The book takes a very interesting path to illustrate this idea of charitable reading, touching on Aristotle and Augustine’s differing ideas of love and friendship, the idea of reading books in a lesbian fashion, the question of whether the “virtue” concept of goodness is inherently warlike and therefore perhaps not Christian, the postmodernist idea of reading books for political ends, the relationship between love and justice and personal and social justice, the question of whether the academy tends towards agonistic or warlike approaches to truth, and the question of whether or not love is better when it is serious or playful. I personally thought that the comments on whether we should love all things only “for God’s glory”, and the question of whether love involves “emptying oneself” were very interesting.
When addressing all of these things Alan Jacobs seems to do a decent job demonstrating such a hermeneutic himself, and therefore seems understated at times, but I don’t think I’ve seen a better response to
postmodernist styles of reading, because he goes beyond criticism to …. well, describe an alternative, at least.
-BenRI
I’d also recommend “The Jesus Way”, by Eugene Peterson.
I thought Faith in the Halls of Power by D. Michael Lindsay (Rice University) was pretty interesting. It’s a sociological study of evangelicals in positions of influence in politics, media, business, etc. Wherever one falls on the political spectrum, I think it provides thought-providing scenarios of how does one live out one’s faith in the world, and these scenarios can be jumping off points for discussion. (E.g., so let’s say you were the CEO/COO of Jockey…how would your faith influence your choice of advertising?)
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