What I’m Reading
Ronald C. White, A. Lincoln: A Biography.
In the year of Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial celebration, my good friend, Ron White, has written what may be the best biography of Lincoln for our generation. This is a fabulous book. I highly recommend it. Ron is a storyteller, and he has now buried himself in the stories of Lincoln for some 15 years of research and study and reflection.
Ron’s style is much like Lincoln’s: understated, quiet, concrete, incisive, even brief. He lets the stories speak for themselves. He sees Lincoln as one who leads with ideas, a leader who leads with language. Lincoln has written some of the greatest speeches in American history, and Ron opens up each of them with great attentiveness to nuance and rhetorical strategy.
While much of Lincoln scholarship of late has viewed Lincoln as at best agnostic, brooding and melancholy, Ron sees Lincoln as a man of deep and honest faith, a leader who reaches down into the deepest resources of the Christian faith for conviction, principles, and spiritual guidance. This is a book that can help us understand our own American story, a book that perhaps can show us direction for the future.
Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
I read this delightful novel over the summer, and I highly recommend it. I can’t remember where I discovered this writer, but Rumer Godden was totally new to me. She was born in England, though she lived most of her life in India, a life that spanned most of the 20th century. This novel is quite exquisite. If you are looking for the intricacies and mysteries of plot, forget it. We enter here a Benedictine convent called Brede, and we find ourselves fully engaged with these amazing nuns. We get to know each of the nuns, their struggles, aspirations, gifts. They are indeed eccentric, each a highly individual character, each bringing a unique ingredient into community. We enter into the quiet intrigue of monastic politics, always there, always just beneath the surface. We understand by the end something of Benedictine teaching, leadership, community life, the importance of worship. We understand in the end something more about what it means to live in genuine community, to live with a common story of deep faith at the center of our life together. What a privilege and delight it is to spend this time in “the house of Brede.”
Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation
Actually I read this book a number of years ago, but I find myself dipping into it over and over all the time. This is truly one of the important books in my life. I believe that not much is done without imagination. Life requires imagination. Leadership requires imagination. Changing the world requires imagination. And Brueggemann guides us into the unique and powerful biblical imagination. The great poets of the Old Testament, he says, “discerned the new actions of God that others did not discern,” but they also “wrought the new actions of God by the power of their imagination, their tongues, their words. New poetic imagination evoked new realities in the community.” This voice becomes “real and winsome,” Brueggemann says. It becomes “authorized and authorizing — in the face of ideologies that want to deny, dismiss, and preclude.” That’s the kind of imagination we need for our day. That’s the voice we need to speak.
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope
This book was originally published in 1967. I had read portions of it along the way, but in expectation of Professor Moltmann’s visit to our campus, I read the book again. I was profoundly moved. I experienced one of those rare kind of reading experiences that shapes one’s life. The heart of this book is that we live as Christians in the light of God’s promise to make all things right in the end. And so we live, as Moltmann says, in “the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day.” That’s our promise. Watch for the signs of the new things God is doing. But even more, work back from that promise to make the world a better place now. Our faith is “forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present.” That’s the message. That’s our hope. I want to live my life in the light of that hope. I want to do everything I can to change the world with that hope. This great German theologian can offer up some challenging prose at times — but it is well worth the effort. I highly recommend this great book.
Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture.
If I could require one book to introduce us all to the strategy and posture of cultural engagement, this is it. This incredible book was written in 1986. Dated, some might say. I don’t think so. Lesslie Newbigin — philosopher, theologian, and missionary to India for most of his life — is quite simply incredible. What does it mean to live and think as vibrant Christians in our modern, postmodern, secular culture? What does it mean to embrace the Christian story in an age when all stories of what is true are called into question? This is a must-read for all of us who consider, as I do, the task of cultural engagement as critical. I consider this book perhaps the most penetrating guide to engaging the culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ written to date.
The Inferno of Dante, translated by Robert Pinsky. (Counterpoint, 2005).
I was alerted by an article in The New York Times last spring about the relevance of Dante’s Inferno to the then-unfolding drama of Bernie Madoff. Having not read this great medieval work since college, I immediately got a copy of Robert Pinsky’s recent and beautiful verse translation. I highly recommend the journey, though you must understand, you are entering a world that is not pretty. This is a journey through hell, as we know, with a 14th-Century view. The agony is unrelenting. Mercy is nowhere to be seen. But the book is also highly contemporary for Dante. He meets a lot of people he knows from the streets of his own Florence. He meets every form of human foible, and he reflects on the violation of God’s notion of human flourishing. We are called by this great work not only to consider the horrifying prospects of hell, but to live differently.
N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).
I have been deeply impacted by this fresh, stimulating, provocative view of the resurrection. I know some of this is a bit controversial, a challenge to our conventional views of heaven. But Wright reminds us that the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that mysterious claim at the center of our faith, is profoundly fundamental to the way we carry out the mission of God’s people in the present. There is hope out ahead! — and so we can and we must live as hopeful people, changing the world in anticipation of what’s yet to come.
Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter: A Novel (Counterpoint, 2005).
This is one piece of Berry’s marvelous saga of rural life in Southern Kentucky — families caught up in social and cultural forces of profound change beyond their control. This is the tragic passing, in Berry’s view, of the deep agrarian roots of American culture. Hannah watches her children leave the farm to pursue their own vocations and comes to the painful realization that she will be the last to live and flourish, even through the hardships, on this precious land. The book is beautiful, reminding us of deep, important values of an agrarian society — hard work, perseverance, living without debt, keeping on in the face of hardship and loss, celebration of bounty, stamina during lean times. This book mourns the loss of the passing of a way of life. We have much to learn from Hannah Coulter.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
While not Eliot’s masterpiece, this fascinating Victorian novel written in 1876, centers around a young woman named Gwendolen — a feisty, brilliant, beautiful woman who is constantly confronting a society that limits the choices for a woman—and our hero, Daniel Deronda, a sensitive and inquisitive young man. Through an amazingly complex, intriguing plot, we look in as one of England’s great novelists explores the emergence of a thriving, increasingly vocal Jewish community at the beginnings of the Zionist movement. What exquisite prose, such beautiful, nuanced, complex writing that is difficult to find in these days of text-messaging. A big book — well worth a patient reading.
John Henry Newman, The Idea Of A University.
This is a re-reading for me, but what a journey it is. This is clearly one of the foundational statements of the purpose of the modern university ever written. Written in 1852, the result of afternoon lectures given in Dublin, Ireland, Newman was called upon by the Pope to stake out a vision statement for a Catholic university that would compete in stature with the Oxford of England. While I disagree with some of Newman’s assumptions (really, who am I to quibble with the great John Henry Newman?), nevertheless, this is where all thoughtful reflection on the nature of the university begins. Truly an extraordinary statement, masterfully delivered.
