In the first two installments of Bookshelf Anomalies I highlighted pairs of books that were ideologically at odds with one another. In this edition, it’s not the actual content of the books that makes things interesting. It’s just the way the titles go together. The two books are:
Knowing Man. Sex God.
Come on, it’s funny.
These two books fall fairly neatly into conservative and liberal/progressive categories. Old Testament Exegesis (by Douglas Stuart of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) is a handbook of sorts for students and pastors, providing a systematic way for studying and exegeting a passage of scripture.
Struggling with Scripture is a different kind of book, a collection of lectures given, if I remember correctly (I don’t have the book in front of me), to some kind of gathering of the PC(USA) dealing with the interpretation of scripture, and it seems specifically how scripture speaks to current debates regarding homosexuality within the denomination. If I remember correctly, at least two of the three authors come to the conclusion that the church should fully include and welcome homosexual relationships and ordination of homosexual pastors, a conclusion I doubt Doug Stuart agrees with.
I’m a little OCD in my book organization. All of my library is on LibraryThing, including each book’s Library of Congress catalog number. So, I arrange my books in order of their Library of Congress number. There might be a few mistakes, but regardless, I put my books on the shelf just like LibraryThing sorts them.
The other day I was putting some books back on the shelf and noticed that a couple of books didn’t exactly belong together. I kept looking through the bookshelves and saw a few more “Bookshelf Anomalies,” pairs of books that make strange bedfellows. So I thought it’d be fun to share a few of those.
The first two I noticed were the books above:
Obviously, the authors of each book don’t exactly see eye-to-eye.
Finished a few books in the past week or so:
Now that I’ve got those books clear and will be heading to the beach for vacation soon, I need to make sure I’ve got good reading material with me. So, I’ll be taking these books with me on vacation:
I don’t expect to read all these books on vacation, but with plane rides there, time in airports, and laying on the beach and in the hotel I should have plenty of down time. Maybe I’ll get through one. One of my greatest fears in life is to want to read something and not have a good book laying around. So, like the good cub scout I was, I’m always prepared.
I also started another book this week: The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer In Christian Ethics. I’ve had the book for a while and have wanted to read something by Hauerwas, who intrigues me even though I’ve never read anything of his. I got introduced to him via quotes I read on blogs and these videos of his lectures.
I know lots of people say to only read one book at a time, but I’ve found it helpful to read at least two books at once. It’s interesting to me to see the connections between books that you read. It seems like my brain is constantly drawing out the implications of one book in light of the other. It’s a good interdisciplinary exercise.
Hopefully I can post my thoughts on the book when I’m done.
I started reading a new book Friday that I’m really excited about. I read Practicing Discernment With Youth: A Transformative Youth Ministry Approach by David F. White last year and really enjoyed about 2/3 of the book. I liked where White was coming from in the book, but thought that he didn’t exactly take his thoughts to anywhere, if I remember correctly. He did an excellent job sizing up where youth ministry and teenagers are at currently, but his proposed solutions and ideas seemed lacking.
What looks like to be his latest publication, along with two other authors, is Awakening Youth Discipleship: Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture. The title just sounds interesting. I’m reading the book for a review on Youth Ministry Exchange, so I’ll post my thoughts when I’m done.
[This review is also published at Youth Ministry Exchange.]
As someone who has been in ministry on college campuses since 1994 through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Don Everts is no stranger to ideas. College campuses are breeding grounds for dialogue, debate, idea sharing, and general philosophizing. It wasn’t until having an email conversation about the nature of the authority of scripture that Everts really began thinking about his thinking. All the Ideas Living in My Head: One Guy’s Musings About Truth is a tour through Everts’ mind and how he approaches thinking about thinking.
Though the book is subtitled as containing musings about truth, the focus of the topic is not necessarily about truth, but ideas. Everts explains that the way he approaches his thought does not fit into the traditional modern and postmodern categories. He describes modernism as understanding ideas as objective facts and postmodernism approaching ideas as subjective experiences. For Everts, the best way to understand his thinking is by thinking of his ideas as people living in his head. His ideas take on their own personality, new ideas must dialogue with current residents in his head, and ideas eventually develop a seniority based on a wide range of factors.
I found myself nodding along as Everts described what he understood to be happening to the differing ideas that found their way into his head. The book is a short and quick read at only seventy-two pages. The books takes a popular tone that uses plain language to describe some fairly provocative ideas. At times I found myself hearing echoes of Donald Miller in Everts’ style.
Though the book is already brief, it could stand a bit more tightening. Thoughts in the book seemed to be repeated often as they are approached from a few different angles. For those in youth ministry, Everts offers what seems to me to be an acceptable way of talking to our students about the way we think, although his ideas are not explicitly Christian. As he states in the beginning of the book, they are simply his thoughts about the nature of his thinking. If you are interested in a book that offers Christian thoughts on certain topics, you might try one of the other three books in this series. The other books appear to take a closer look at three of the ideas that “live” in his head: the Bible, evil and hell, and tolerance. Though I haven’t read those books yet, I would expect that they would exhibit an explicitly Christian way of thinking about those topics.
Don Everts is an engaging writer, but the repetitive nature of this particular topic seemed to limit the display of his talent. The book offers a fun, easy read on the way in which Everts’ mind functions, which is probably similar to many of his readers. However, there is nothing groundbreaking or thought provoking that would make this a must-read for those in youth ministry. If the topic interests you, you will likely enjoy the book.
I must have really been living under a rock for the past few months. I didn’t even know he was working on a book, and I read on another blog that he just released another book
As I said yesterday, I hoped to pick up a good book in the evening, and I did. I’ve been looking forward to reading Everyday Theology since it first came out. I’ve been a fan of Vanhoozer ever since I was introduced to him in Dr. Castleman’s class. I expect this to be a somewhat “practical” book that will be especially helpful for doing youth ministry theologically. I’ll give more insight about this particular book as I read more of it. My expectations are already high, so I hope it doesn’t let me down. I had high hopes for the book How to Think Theologically by Howard Stone and James Duke but was a bit disappointed.
Until then, here is the blurb from Amazon.com:
Everyday theology is the reflective and practical task of living each day as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. In other words, theology is not just for Sundays, and it’s not just for professional theologians. Everyday Theology teaches all Christians how to get the theological lay of the land. It enables them to become more conscious of the culture they inhabit every day so that they can understand how it affects them and how they can affect it. If theology is the ministry of the Word to the world, everyday theologians need to know something about that world, and Everyday Theology shows them how to understand their culture make an impact on it. Engaging and full of fresh young voices, this book is the first in the new Cultural Exegesis series.
Yesterday, I posted on Andrew Root’s brand-new book, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry. I spoke with pretty high regard for the book, saying,
While reading the book, I came to the realization that, to my knowledge, there is no youth ministry book that is as theologically deep and rich as Root’s. Kenda Creasy Dean and Ron Foster’s book The Godbearing Life is the only work close to Root’s in nature, but even it does not probe the depths of a particular theological subject like Root’s. In my estimation, Root’s book will be noted as being the first in a line of theological books written specifically for the context of youth ministry. With the publication of this book, a new (and needed) genre has been birthed.
Creating a new genre isn’t bad for a first book.
The reason this book excites me so much is that I believe this book is an eschatalogical event (okay, that might be a little bit of a stretch). Let me explain. Over a year ago I predicted that the next 50 years of youth ministry would see the theologizing of youth ministry. I said, among other things,
This is why I say that the theologization of youth ministry in the next 50 years will determine whether or not it will live or die. In order to be faithful to the gospel, and not bound to success, we must be able to discern when we are being faithful and when we are neutering the gospel. Among other things, theology is the practice of discernment. For those who are called as professional youth ministers, we must possess within us the ability to perceive the theological implications of everything that we do. Instead of seeing the goal and achieving it with any means possible, we must determine whether or not our means is theologically sound as well.
Yes, I do think I made that “theologization” word up.
For me, Root’s book is the expectation of the future coming to pass in the present. With Root’s book we are making the turn towards a new paradigm in youth ministry.
Yes, the book is a bit difficult to read for some; it is truly a theological work. Yes, we want to ask “but will this work?” Yes, sometimes it seems like there is a bit of practicality missing from the book.
But the reason this book might be so uncomfortable, so challenging, so unfamiliar, and so overwhelming for many of us is that we are reading it while still operating out of the current paradigm of ministry while Root is coming to the table with a completely different set of presuppositions. We would do well to listen to it diligently, since it will be our tendency to try and fit the book into our current paradigm. But to do so would be to lose the weight of the book.
This is the first book to my knowledge that is doing real theology for the sake of youth ministry. But I don’t believe it will be the last. The future of youth ministry is upon us.
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