Favorite Books from 2004

There have been so many other excellent books this year, including the continuing collection in the Emergent/YS line … but these stand out for special mention.

I won’t mention all the manuscripts that I endorsed this year. I sometimes get so far behind that I can’t say yes to all the endorsement requests I receive, but let me assure you that I actually read the manuscripts I am able to endorse, and I mean what I say in endorsements.

I did a lot of reading on hell/damnation/final judgment this year, researching The Last Word and the Word After That (which will be out in March, and which can be pre-ordered now on Amazon.com). I was especially impressed by Jan Bonda’s The One Purpose of God: An Answer to the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment. Also very helpful was Craig Hill’s In God’s Time: the Bible and the Future. I also re-read Dante’s Divine Comedy and was struck again by its strange mix of humor and gruesomeness.

I read and re-read a lot of Walter Brueggemann’s works this year in preparation for the emergent theological conversation with him in September. Struggling with Scripture (with William Placher and Brian Blount) and Ichabod Toward Home were especially stimulating.

I appreciated Marva Dawn’s Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God (an exploration of Paul’s concept of “principalities and powers”) and The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann (a gift from my friend Sky Diamond, giving a wonderful window into Eastern Orthodox spirituality).

I spent part of my summer in Africa with my daughter Jodi, and two novels about Africa stood out in my Africa-related reading: Things Fall Apart by Nigerian Chinua Achebe tells the story of the coming of missionaries and colonialists and the corresponding loss of old tribal ways – from the perspective of an Ibo family. It’s heartbreaking and insightful and wonderfully written. Former missionary to Uganda Greg Taylor wrote High Places, and I was greatly impressed both by the quality of his writing (like me, he writes “on the side,” with ministry work being his “day job”) and by the story, characterization, pathos, and insight of the book.

Islam, Postmodernism, and Other Futures: A Ziadding Sardar Reader introduced me to this important, brilliant, and often disturbing Muslim thinker and author.

Currently I’m slowly working my way through David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. It’s rich, at times difficult, and so far, very rewarding work, engaging with a lot of contemporary thinkers, and written from an Eastern Orthodox perspective.

I’ve read so many good books this year, and I can’t remember a single really bad one (at least not one that I finished). We’re blessed with so many great writers these days – and plenty of important things to write about.