Letters to a Future Saint: cover, blurbs, pub date, and more!

I’m pleased to announce that my next book, Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry, has an official publication date, a cover, blurbs galore, and more. It’s due October 1. Now feast your eyes:

Isn’t that lovely? The theme continues on the inside, too; I can’t wait for folks to see how it’s designed.

Here’s the official book description:

An invitation to the Christian faith for the bored, the distracted, and the spiritually hungry 

Dear future saint, 

Why is the gospel worth living for? 

Why is it worth dying for? 

In these letters, a fellow pilgrim addresses future saints: the bored and the distracted, the skeptical and the curious, the young and the spiritually hungry. Lively and readable, these bite-sized letters explain the basics of Christian life, including orthodox doctrine, the story of Scripture, the way of discipleship, and more.

Interweaving Scripture, poetry, and theological writings, Letters to a Future Saint educates readers in the richness of the Christian tradition. But beyond that, this earnest and approachable volume offers young people— who may be largely uninformed of the depths of faith despite having been raised in Christian homes —an invitation into the life of the church and into a deeper relationship with God.

And here are the endorsements, which—well, just read on:

“Rule number one in sharing the Christian faith with young people: don’t patronise. Assume they are morally serious and intellectually curious; that they are in search of a structure that will carry the weight of their anxieties, passions and imaginative energy. And if you start from that sort of point, the book you might well want to put into their hands is something very like this one—clear, respectful, challenging, candid, gracious.” 
—Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury 

“In this little book, East teaches about the gospel—he catechizes. But its epistolary format allows what could seem tiresome or didactic to become conversational and approachable. These letters tell the story of Jesus in many ways, from many different angles, and with a lightness of touch. They also convey what it might feel like to be a Christian and to think about the world in light of the story of Jesus. If you are someone who cares about young people or those of any age finding their way in the spiritual life—if you care about future saints—read this book and share it with others.” 
—Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night

“The letters that Brad East writes here are signed, ‘Yours in Christ, a fellow pilgrim,’ and that tells you most of what you need to know about this wonderful book. It’s a warmhearted, clear-sighted account of life ‘in Christ,’ not pronounced from on high, but narrated by someone a little farther along the Way than the young people it’s addressed to. This is a book to give to many of those pilgrims near the outset of their journey.” 
—Alan Jacobs, Jim and Sharon Harrod Chair of Christian Thought, Baylor University   

“Sometimes catechisms seem to emphasize truth at the expense of life. The parroting back of doctrinal answers to posed questions, while often valuable, can be dangerous for those tempted to think of Christianity as the mastery of syllogisms rather than as the Way of the Cross. In this book, Brad East takes us along as he guides a young pilgrim in the path that is Jesus. Reading this will help you see your own faith with fresh eyes and will prompt you to be not just a disciple but a discipler.” 
—Russell Moore, editor in chief, Christianity Today   

“Brad East does not cease to astound. This book is both spiritual meditation and pocket catechism—it instructs as it inspires, and its contents explain Christianity in a way both simple and profound. This is the kind of book to spread around everywhere: airports, homes, churches, used bookstores, universities, and so on. Professor East has something important to teach each one of us!” 
—Matthew Levering, James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary  

“In this time of widespread unclarity, Brad East’s insightful letters help us see what being a Christian might look like. A fascinating book that helps us see the fascinating character of our faith.” 
—Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law, Duke University 

“A personal, readable, informed, and confident exposition of the Christian faith—so confident, in fact, that it starts and ends with an invitation to martyrdom in the service of Christ! East’s unwillingness to make Christ into a founder of a ‘religion of comfortableness’ (Nietzsche) is admirable.” 
—Miroslav Volf, Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale Divinity School

I have no words. I swung for the fences, and somehow managed multiple grand slams. I’m speechless. I’ve been reading these writers since seminary, some for going on two decades. It’s such an honor to have their endorsements for this book. Thanks to them and to all who decide to give the book a chance based on their recommendation.

Letters to a Future Saint is out in just over five months. (Three weeks later my other new book, The Church: A Guide to the People of God, will be published. When it rains, it pours!) You can pre-order it wherever you prefer: Eerdmans, Christianbook, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon. Or pre-order a copy from each just to be safe! Your call.

This book’s publication is a dream come true, in more ways than one. I’m beyond excited to share it with readers. I hope you’ll be one, and will share it with others.

The Church: cover, blurbs, pub date, and Amazon pre-order page!

Habemus cover! And publication date! And blurbs! And more!

The book in question is The Church: A Guide to the People of God. It’s the sixth in Lexham’s Christian Essentials series. Here’s the cover:

Just … wow. Perfect. The Lexham folks really know what they’re doing. (For comparison, here are the other covers in the series.)

How about some blurbs? Here they are, in all their glory. Allow me to find my fainting couch before reading them again:

This is a bright, thoughtful and passionate account of the church. Brad East roots ecclesiology in the story of Israel and the story of Jesus Christ, and in doing so provides a number of fresh perspectives which can help us in our doctrine and our practice.
—Andrew Wilson, teaching pastor at King's Church London

This book is pure delight! Inspiring, instructive, enriching, beautifully written, this book makes one want to be a Christian. It is next to impossible to write an ecumenically rewarding book on the theology of the church, but Brad East has done it!
—Matthew Levering, James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary

Brad East's account of Mary as the firstborn of the Church is brilliant. The theology in this book is at once scriptural and creative. With this book East becomes one of the more important theologians writing today.
—Stanley Hauerwas, Professor (retired), Duke Divinity School

I find this an extraordinary book. It is short. It is written with simplicity and clarity. And yet it covers so much, introducing its readers to an extraordinarily rich field of theology.
—Karen Kilby, Bede Professor of Catholic Theology, Durham University

In twelve concise, accessible, penetrating, and artistically-crafted chapters, Brad East provides an introductory guide to the Church as the messianic expansion of Israel among the nations of the earth. Rooting the identity of the Church in the biblical story of God's love for Israel, East shows how the redemptive work of Jesus completes that story, and is incomprehensible apart from that story. This introduction to the Church is both simple and profound—like the good news itself, which the Church proclaims and embodies.
—Mark Stephen Kinzer, moderator of Yachad BeYeshua, an international interconfessional fellowship of Jewish disciples of Yeshua, and Senior Scholar and President Emeritus of Messianic Jewish Theological Institute

Brad East's The Church wonderfully enhances the already marvelous Lexham series on Christian "Essentials." Building off of the Church's "Mystery" that is Christ's Body, as Ephesians proclaims, East outlines the story of God's people born of Abraham, in its breadth, beauty, imperative, and promise. Lucid, compact, attractive, and appropriately rich with the figures of Scripture's visionary treasure, this book is not only a fine introduction for new Christians of all traditions, but a well from which to draw continued reflection and prayerful praise. Highly commended!
—Ephraim Radner, Professor of Historical Theology, Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto

There are no words. My thanks to each of them for taking the time to read the manuscript and for their remarkable kindness. I hope other readers feel similarly!

Here is the official description of the book (written by Lexham, not by me):

You belong to God's family. But do you understand what that means?

The Bible tells the story of God and his people. But it is not merely history. It is our story. Abraham is our father. And Israel's freedom from slavery is ours.

Brad East traces the story of God's people, from father Abraham to the coming of Christ. He shows how we need the scope of the entire Bible to fully grasp the mystery of the church. The church is not a building but a body. It is not peripheral or optional in the life of faith. Rather, it is the very beating heart of God's story, where our needs and hopes are found.

That captures perfectly what I’m up to in the book. Short and sweet.

If any of the above piques your interest, here’s the good news: the book is up on Amazon and available for pre-order. As for when it’s coming out…

The publication date is October 23. That’s 39 weeks from now. A long time to wait. So why not make sure it’ll be in your mailbox on time?

Can you tell I’m excited? I’m excited. This is all not even to mention the fact that my other book coming out this fall also has its official cover and a publication date (let’s just say it’s not far off from this one). But I’ll save that announcement for another day, particularly once it too is up on Amazon and I’ve got blurbs and galleys in hand.

Until then. Thanks to everyone, but above all to Todd Hains, who made this happen from start to finish. He’s the man.

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Update: I neglected to add two things.

First, head here for a webpage dedicated to the book. I’ll also add/share links to the publisher’s website for folks who want to check it out there or who want to avoid giving money to Mr. Bezos.

Second, I forgot to include the table of contents for those interested in such things. Here you go:

Series Preface
Prayers of the People

1. Mystery
2. Mother
3. Chosen
4. Bound
5. Redeemed
6. Holy
7. Ruled
8. Beloved
9. Incarnate
10. Sent
11. Entrusted
12. Benediction

Acknowledgments
Permissions
Notes
Worked Cited
Author Index
Scripture Index

2024: forthcoming

I’ve looked back on 2023 in three posts: what I read, what I wrote, and what I posted on the blog. Here’s a look at what’s to come in 2024.

Books

The biggest thing is not one but two books, both set to be published in the fall. I should have actual publication dates and links to pre-order soon. I’m confident both will be out by AAR/SBL/Thanksgiving/Advent—in other words, for all your Christmas gift needs.

I’ve discussed these books plenty at this point, but here’s another reminder.

The first is called The Church: A Guide to the People of God. Published with Lexham, it’s part of the Christian Essentials series, which features previous entries by Ben Myers, Peter Leithart, Wesley Hill, and others. The series as a whole has become a trilogy of trilogies: Creed–Decalogue–Lord’s Prayer, Baptism–Eucharist–Forgiveness of Sins, Bible–Liturgy–Church. Out of nine books total, mine is the sixth. Without endnotes it’s just over 30,000 words. I signed off on the final typeset proofs last week; the cover is official; the blurbs are in. It’s heading to the printers this month, I’m told. I’m excited, y’all! This one’s meant for churches, Bible studies, Sunday School, small groups, and college curricula. For thoughtful Christians of all ages wanting to learn more about the Bible’s story of the calling and purpose and course and destiny of God’s chosen people. Mostly, as you surely expect, it’s an unhurried figural stroll through the Scriptures of Israel.

The second book is called Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry. Published with Eerdmans, this one comes from the heart. It’s written directly for the undergraduate students I’ve taught for going on seven years now. Call it an epistolary catechism, if you want to use a phrase you won’t find in the book, since it’s written at a level any graduating senior from high school wouldn’t find odd or off-putting. It’s not a work of apologetics; I’m not convincing a skeptic to convert. The book consists of brief letters written to a young believer who wants to move from milk to meat, from adolescence to maturity, from thinking about Christ to following him all the way to the cross. I think it works. I hope it works. I know the great need for a book like this. Much more anon!

As I said, book #1 is out of my hands. Book #2 is in between copy-edits and type-setting. But it’s moving fast. I expect proofs and a cover in my inbox in the next month or two. Then an Amazon page in the spring, and we’re off to the races.

I imagine much of my fall will be taken up with podcasts and other marketing duties for both books. To all professors, editors, magazines, journals, bloggers, and podcasters: Consider this a heads up! Request the book! Read it! Review it! Have me on! Let’s get this done.

Sabbatical + the next book

Next academic year (fall 2024–spring 2025) I will be on research leave, my first ever sabbatical. I’m going to dedicate an entire blog post to that remarkable fact, about which I’m still somewhat in disbelief. The primary “product” of that time is meant to be a manuscript due to Lexham in summer 2025; it’s part of their Ministry Guides series, called Technology: For the Care of Souls. More on that in the future as well.

My goal is to avoid writing a single word of that manuscript in 2024. This calendar year my goal, before and during the sabbatical, can be summed up with one word: read. Read, read, read. Double or triple what I usually read. In all the things, but especially in tech.

Which means less writing than usual. But not nothing either.

Essays, articles, reviews, and more

I’ve already got a number of pieces in the hopper for this year:

• In Interpretation, a review of Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter’s The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture, in Interpretation (just published, in fact)

• In Restoration Quarterly, an article called “Churches of Christ: Once Catholic, Now Evangelical”

• In Syndicate, a long review of Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (part of a symposium dedicated to the book)

• In Commonweal, a review of Matthew Thiessen’s A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles

• In Comment, a review essay of Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

• In The Los Angeles Review of Books, a review essay of Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis

• In Christianity Today, a review of John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way: Be With Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did

• In The Hedgehog Review, an essay on the politics of the Slow Horses/Slough House series of spy novels by Mick Herron

• In a volume for Baylor University Press on teaching theology, a chapter on … teaching theology

Two more essays are written but have yet to find a home: one on Albert Borgmann and one on Mary, Theotokos, and abortion. I’ll also be giving a paper at the SBL conference in San Diego. But aside from that, and assuming most or all of the above essays and reviews are published by April at the latest, the remaining eight months of the year are basically a clean slate. For once!

I’ve no doubt ideas for reviews and essays will bubble to the surface over the months, and I’m always mentally ticking off publications for which I’ve never published but would love to. My hope, though, is to use my time wisely from May through December to focus on research and not to let my extra time be dominated by writing I can always make time for, even with a 4/4 teaching load, when for once I have time for the reading my teaching load doesn’t allow for.

All in all, God willing, it should be a good year, professionally speaking, and in more than one way. Now to hurry up and wait.

2023: reading

Over the last few years I’ve had the goal of inching my way from 100 books annually up to 150. Last year I hit 122. This year I’ll be lucky to finish with 90. What happened?

A passel of 1,000-page novels, is the first answer. Writing and editing not one but two books of my own, is the second. And third is surely some mix of happenstance, fatigue, and time management. So be it. The books I read this year were good, even if I didn’t hit the number I was aiming for. There’s always next year.

The list below does not include every book I read over the last 12 months, just my favorites across a handful of categories. You’ll see that I read a lot of good fiction and nonfiction. Not so much theology! I leave it to readers to decide whether that’s a reflection on academic theology or on me.

Comments and links throughout, as well as promissory notes on reviews that I’ve written but have yet to be published.

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Rereads

5. Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. I read this when it was in draft form, as the Gifford lectures, but I’d never read the book version cover to cover. I had, and still nurture, the idea of writing an essay putting Tanner and David Graeber together in a theological reflection on work. We’ll see.

4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

3. John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Not his very best—that’s A Perfect Spy—but in the top five. Even better on the second time through.

2. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove. The beauty still shines in the story and dialogue and characters, but the brutality is more apparent. “A dark tale lightly told” indeed.

1. Tad Williams, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. As I wrote here, this return to the classic trilogy (a million words in all?) was in preparation for the sequel tetralogy (see below). My love for the series, the author, and the prose is unabated. And the narrator for the audiobook is can’t-miss for lovers of Osten Ard.

Fiction

10. Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury. Not a great book, but popular and influential; part of my attempt to read through the canonical authors of American crime fiction.

9. Adam Roberts, Purgatory Mount. The framing device is gripping, but I didn’t love the middle. Roberts is always worth reading, though.

8. Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die.

7. Denis Johnson, Train Dreams.

6. J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan. Had never read it; am listening to it now. The narrator is Jim Dale. He’s perfect. It’s a treat when you turn to a classic and immediately understand why.

5. Larry McMurtry, Streets of Laredo. Finally read the sequel to Lonesome Dove, where McMurtry lays waste at once to beloved characters, “bad fans,” and any remaining trace of romance we may have had with the West. It’s thrilling. And more affecting than I expected.

4. Mick Herron, Slough House. Having read the first two books in the ongoing “Slow Horses” series, I read the next six in the new year, plus a collection of short stories. In the spring I have an essay in The Hedgehog Review on the series as a whole. It’s great, if confused in its politics; as is the TV show starring Gary Oldman.

3. Tad Williams, The Last King of Osten Ard. No missed opportunity here. Williams keeps breaking my heart, but the books are on a par with what came before. I was preparing for the fourth and final book’s release last month … only for it to be delayed by a year. I’m told it’s written, but the publisher chose to delay it. Oh well. I’ll be ready.

2. Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest. No words. Just read it.

1. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces. Ditto. When I finished the last page, I had plans to write a long essay comparing Toole to Melville, with Dunces a kind of madcap multicultural New-Orleans-meets-Chesterton Don Quixote for postwar America. Is Ignatius J. Reilly the white whale, a knight-errant, a holy fool, or just a fool? I forgot the answer, probably because I was laughing so hard. The novel is a one of one. Tolle lege!

Poetry

Another down year for my poetry reading. I always re-read Franz Wright, Mary Karr, Marie Howe, Christian Wiman, and Wendell Berry. This year I read some Les Murray and Allen Tate. More next year, I hope.

Christian (popular)

7. Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers.

6. Tish Harrison Warren, Advent: The Season of Hope & Emily Hunter McGowin, Christmas: The Season of Life and Light. I love this new series. Need to snag Epiphany before we turn to Lent and Easter.

5. Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. Is there anything McCaulley can’t do? New Testament scholarship, theological hermeneutics, liturgical devotions, children’s books, NYT op-eds … and now a bracing, moving memoir. There were more than a few moments that took my breath away. Recommended.

4. Samuel D. James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age. Immediately added this to the syllabus for my course on discipleship in a digital age. Excellent!

3. Beth Moore, All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir. We all know Beth Moore is a treasure. I suggest listening to her read it. I wept.

2. Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning Within the Life of Faith. Matt is a friend, so I’m biased, but I can’t wait to start giving this book to college students. It’s just what the doctor ordered. And the best thing Matt’s ever written in terms of style. Accessible yet poetic and pious in equal parts. For the brainy or doubting believer in your orbit. (Two-part interview plus podcast discussion over the book.)

1. Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Easily a top-5 for 2023 new releases. Here’s my review.

Nonfiction

10. Mark Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization. Review here.

9. Tara Isabella Burton, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from da Vinci to the Kardashians. Review here.

8. John Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. Good fun. Not just a joke, though. Gray contains multitudes.

7. Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress.

6. Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide.

5. Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. I sort of can’t believe how good this book is. It needed to be written; it needed to be written by the contributors involved; it needed to be published by Harvard; it needed to be readable, consisting of short entries by a range of theists, atheists, and agnostics. And somehow it was.

4. Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Wrote about this here.

3. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture. To call Murray unique is an understatement bordering on an insult. He died in 2013. We needed his voice more than ever in the decade since.

2. Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Alongside Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, this is the first book I recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about modern Israel.

1. Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. There’s no one writing today quite like Christian Wiman. My review of his latest should be out in Comment next month. I’ve got a lot to say!

Theology (newer)

7. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything. Ten months ago I wrote a long review of this for Syndicate. I hope it comes out soon so I can finally share it with people!

6. Joseph Ratzinger, Many Religions—One Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World.

5. Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Every pastor, elder, and church leader needs a copy.

4. Esau McCaulley, Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance: Davidic Messianism and Paul’s Worldwide Interpretation of the Abrahamic Land Promise in Galatians.

3. Jonathan Rowlands, The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research: A Prolegomenon to a Future Quest for the Historical Jesus. I wish I’d had this in hand a dozen years ago; it would have helped immensely. As it is, we have it now, and it’s a must-read for all biblical scholars, historical critics, and theologians interested in reading Scripture theologically, responsibly, and/or historically.

2. Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. See my review in a forthcoming issue of Commonweal.

1. Ross McCullough, Freedom and Sin: Evil in a World Created by God. Another biased pick, since Ross is a good friend, but an honest choice nonetheless. One of the best new works of theology in years. The only remotely satisfying treatment of theodicy, compatibilism, determinism, and human/divine agency I’ve ever read. Extra points for being concise and stylish and witty without losing an ounce of substance.

Theology (older)

4. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. What a weird but invigorating book.

3. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. Almost unbearably painful, given the way it cuts to the quick. But also full of the deepest consolations. Sometimes it really is Christ addressing you, the reader, by name.

2. Patrick Ahern, trans. and ed., Maurice & Thérèse: The Story of a Love. A window into the heart of Saint Thérèse. Probably the best introduction to her, too. Recommended to me by a friend. A beautiful book. Thanks to the good bishop for putting it together.

1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées. We all have gaps in our reading. I’d never (seriously) read Pascal. For the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth, I read his most celebrated work. It did not disappoint.

Writing for a Tier 2 audience

Last month I published a typology of four audiences for Christian writing: Tier 1 (anyone at all), Tier 2 (college-educated laypeople), Tier 3 (pastors and intellectuals), and Tier 4 (scholars). The post continues to generate a lot of conversation with friends and acquaintances. It’s been generative for my own thinking.

I’ve found myself wondering: What does Tier 2 writing look like? And I’ve got some ideas. What follows is a list of basic mechanics. I’d call them do’s and don’ts, but they’re pretty much all the latter. In another post I plan to think about how to make one’s Tier 2 writing not just accessible but good. In both cases, though, I’m not describing what makes prose in general good. I’m thinking about a particular kind of prose. So this isn’t a list of what makes for quality writing simpliciter. We need to ask first: What sort of writing? In what genre? For whom? With what goals? Those are the questions that matter, at least in this case.

Without further adieu, then, here are twelve rules for Tier 2 writing:

1. Short(er) sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Not much more to say here. Don’t try your reader’s attention. Be direct. Be declarative. Be fruitful and multiply your five-line sentences, trim your flowery filler, kill your adverbs, and stop interrupting your flow of thought with so many em dashes.

2. No footnotes. Footnotes are intimidating and, in a Tier 2 book, unnecessary. Use endnotes, preferably unnumbered. Resist the urge to defend and support every claim you make on the page with a dozen citations. Appropriate elsewhere, not here.

3. No jargon. “Plain English” is the rule here. One editor I’ve worked with on multiple essays uses the “P.E.” line as a shorthand for any time I revert to academese. Remember: No one but academics speaks that language, and then only some of them, cordoned off by rarefied disciplinary dialects. Remember further that, outside of highly technical discursive contexts—you see what I did there?—jargon is a crutch. And if something can’t be said in language a Tier 2 reader can understand, then perhaps you’re writing for the wrong audience.

4. No untranslated words. This means, above all, never use a word from another language as if the reader should know what it means: eschaton, torah, phenomenological, faux pas, Aufklärung, munus triplex, whatever. If you must, on a rare fitting occasion, introduce the reader to a foreign word, then do so gently and seamlessly, and be clear that you have reasons for doing so. (Why, in other words, you aren’t just saying “church” instead of ekklesia.) Furthermore, avoid fancy Latinate words like “omnipotent” when “almighty” or “all-powerful” are ready to hand. Sometimes a whiff of antiquity is pleasant, but more often it reeks of self-importance and showing off.

5. No, or spare use of, massive block quotations. Like footnotes, these break up the flow of a page’s writing and can scare off otherwise curious readers. It also suggests that the reader should maybe be reading someone other than you, since apparently you can’t put it well in your own words. (A friend’s anecdote: Reading famous Evangelical Writer X as a teenager, the quotations and block-quotes of C. S. Lewis were so prevalent that it made him realize he ought to be reading Lewis instead of X. The intuition proved correct.)

6. No incessant, cluttered, or paragraph-littered use of parenthetical references to passages of Scripture. This is a tough one. It’s my own habit, as it is just about any Christian writer’s who engages Scripture for a believing audience. I think this is fine at Tier 3 and for works in the 2.3-2.9 range. But my sense is that true Tier 2.0 readers find this practice distracting, off-putting, and intimidating. It’s not that they can’t handle it. It just doesn’t help you, the author, accomplish your purposes with the reader. There are other ways of citing, quoting, and alluding to Scripture than parentheses constantly interrupting clauses or concluding every third sentence. Be creative!

7. No unidentified authors, historical figures, historical events, doctrines, or concepts. This one’s simple. Don’t write, “As Saint Irenaeus says…” Write instead, “Saint Irenaeus, a bishop from the second century, once wrote…” Or if the reader won’t know what a bishop is, call him “a pastor and writer.” Or, if “from the second century” rankles, then say “who was born about a century after the crucifixion of Jesus.” Or “who died about a century after Saint Paul and Saint Peter were killed in Rome.” Or whatever would least ostentatiously and most intuitively make sense as a chronological point of connection for your audience. (You could always just put the date of the figure’s life in parentheses if that were to fit the nature of your book, too.) The point, in any case, is to avoid random and unqualified mention of “Saint John of Damascus” or “the Great Schism” or “the perseverance of the saints” or “imputed righteousness”—readers run for the exits at that sort of thing, especially when they add up.

8. No preface to quotes, events, books, or authors as “famous.” This is a minor rule, but it’s common enough to call out: Writers call things “famous” out of insecurity. Namely, they want the reader to know they’re not being original, that they’re aware that “everyone knows” the line or text or person being trotted out for display. But in a Tier 2 setting, not everyone knows this. Calling something “famous” to a reader who’s never heard of it is inhospitable and condescending. Drop this tic!

9. No passing reference to what only the extremely-online would know. Some Gen X, many millennial, and most Gen Z writers spend a lot of time online. When you live online, you forget that most people don’t—or at least, that their online living is nothing like yours. Normal people don’t know what “edgelord” means. (I’ve had to Google it more than once to remind myself! My time off Twitter is having an effect…) Normal people don’t follow sub-cultural dramas litigated on social media between no-name writers. Normal people follow Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift. So don’t write like you’re online; don’t write like your book has hyperlinks; don’t make tempest-in-a-teapot episodes illustrative of some larger point. Write about the real world, the one we all live in together.

10. No passing reference to culture-war topics (as though the topic itself, the nature of the debate, or the “right” opinion is obvious or given). Most people are aware of this or that culture-war issue. But most people aren’t particularly informed about it in detail. And most people certainly don’t like it being parachuted onto the page out of nowhere. It raises their blood pressure. If the context calls for discussion of some hot-button issue, then introduce it with care and charity. But let your writing lower the temperature—even if what you have to say is passionate or fiery. Understanding should precede argument, and if argument is called for, then the matter shouldn’t be treated as self-evident.

11. No glib swipes at “backwards” or stupid or wicked ideas. I don’t mean ideas like eugenics or Stalinism. I mean ideas that continue to generate fierce debate, ideas that mark out one tribe from another. Often these are ideas that the author herself has left behind for greener pastures. We always treat our own former selves least generously. Don’t put down readers who happen to agree with your younger self. Even if they’re wrong, they deserve your respect. Nothing loses a reader faster than being talked down to.

12. No presumption of universal or shared agreement on just about anything. This is only a slight exaggeration. Obviously, if you’re writing for Christians, it’s appropriate to assume a general Christian framework or backdrop. But what does that entail? Christians disagree about a lot! Instead of assuming—and you know what that makes of you—address the reader as an intelligent and curious disciple whose specific beliefs and ideas are opaque to you. Make the case for what you think, assuming only that the reader is open-minded and open-hearted enough to hear you out in good faith. Cards are on the table and nothing is being taken for granted. That’s a recipe for reaching readers and not alienating any of them, no matter how strongly they disagree with you or how skeptical they were when they first opened your book.

In the next post, hopefully sometime next week, I’ll return with another dozen or so suggestions about what makes Tier 2 writing not just accessible for its intended audience, but good. Part of that has to do with style, but another part has to do with resisting certain tropes of the genre that bear on substance. Until then.

Four tiers of Christian/theological publishing

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about types of theological writing: style, accessibility, demographics, audience, and more. I think about it both as a writer and as a professor who regularly assigns or recommends authors and books to students. Who’s in view? Who could make sense of this text? Is the prose clear, stylish, or neither?

After some reflection, it occurred to me that there are four levels or tiers of theological writing—by which I really mean Christian writing, in this case (a) books (b) composed in English, (c) published by Christian authors (d) about Christian matters, and (e) meant for a readership in North America. Before I list the tiers, let me be clear that they have nothing to do with quality. They have everything to do with genre and audience, and the way a book reflects those two factors. I’m going to list plenty of examples within each tier, as well as instances of writers or texts that straddle the fence between tiers.

Tier 1: Universal

Audience: Anyone at all.

Examples: Beth Moore, Max Lucado, T. D. Jakes, Sadie Robertson Huff, Bob Goff, Jonathan Pokluda, Joel Osteen.

Genre: Inspirational; devotional; personal; Bible study; church curriculum.

Available: Lifeway, Mardel, Barnes & Noble, airports—and anywhere online.

Description: This level includes authors who write Christian books for anyone and everyone. Teenagers, grandmothers, businessmen, stay-home moms, believers, skeptics, heretics, normie laity: you name it, they’re the audience. These books, when popular, sell in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. They are often deeply personal. You get to know the names of the author’s spouse and children and parents and friends. The content is usually geared toward uplift: the reader is meant to be inspired toward hope, courage, and personal change in his or her daily life. These books often contain practical advice. They’re about how to love God and follow Jesus in the most ordinary life possible—in other words, the life available to 99% of us. Sometimes they assume an affluent readership, but by no means always. You can find these books just about anywhere. Their authors usually (not always) lack formal or elite credentials; if they’ve got credentials, authors avoid flaunting them (that’s not why you’re reading their book) or the credentials have to do with ministry (a Master of Divinity, say, or having founded a successful ministry/church). Authors rarely began their careers as writers but quickly become sought-after speakers. These days they tend to have strong followings on social media, a personal podcast, or YouTube. Egghead Christians like myself are very rarely attuned to this level of Christian writing; often enough we’ve never read these books and don’t even know many of the biggest authors’ names. We suppose “committed Christians” read our books, or our friends’ books, or the books we were assigned in grad school, or the “successful” books put out for “popular audiences” by our academic colleagues. Nope. These are the books Christians reads. If I had to guess, I’d wager they make up more than 90% of Christian publishing sales in the U.S. If neither pastors’ libraries nor seminaries existed, I think that percentage would approach (if not quite reach) 100%.

Tier 2: Popular

Audience: College-educated Christians who enjoy reading to learn more about the faith.

Examples: Tish Harrison Warren, Tim Keller, John Mark Comer, Dane Ortlund, Jemar Tisby, N. T. Wright, Barbara Brown Taylor, Anne Lamott, Wesley Hill, Austin Channing Brown, Andy Crouch, Lauren Winner, Andrew Wilson, James K. A. Smith, Tara Isabella Burton, Esau McCaulley, Ben Myers, Rod Dreher, John Piper, Richard Foster, Eugene Peterson, Cornel West, C. S. Lewis.

Genre: Intro-level introduction to Christian doctrines or ideas; mix of memoir and argument; adaptation of a sermon series into book; Christian treatment of relevant or controversial topic; presentation of Christian faith as a whole; higher-level study of Bible or Christian teaching.

Available: Mostly online, but sometimes in major bookstores like Barnes & Noble.

Description: This level includes authors who write books for Christians with a college degree, usually Christians who would describe themselves as “readers.” These readers, though, are not theological in any formal sense. They did not go to seminary. They are not pastors. They don’t know jargon. Books in this group do not contain words like “eschatological.” If you happen upon that word in a book, you know immediately that you’re already in Tier 3 or 4. The readers in this level may be serious Christians, they may be thoughtful, they may be good readers—but they are not interested in anything with even a whiff of the academic. Tier 2 books, accordingly, are on the shorter side; they don’t shy away from the personal or anecdotal; they lack footnotes (some will have endnotes); they assume faith on the part of the reader; they feel like a gentle conversation between the author (a teacher) and the reader (a learner). Here credentials do matter. The author is almost always a pastor, a professor, or a graduate of a seminary or doctoral program. He or she possesses some kind of expertise, one that invites (without threatening) the reader. The concepts in the book may be complex or abstract, but the language in which the concepts are presented is not. It is as simple as possible. Not only no jargon, but little vocabulary above a high school level. That’s no slam on either reader or writer: as Orwell and Lewis both observed, it’s harder to write this way than it is to rely on fancy words as a crutch. Go read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The prose is flawless, and yet there may not be a single word in six hundred pages that an eighth grader (at least, one from Texas) wouldn’t recognize. That’s a gift and a virtue, not a shortcoming. In any case, Tier 2 books populate the curricula of larger churches with a high proportion of college-educated folks. In churches that don’t fit that bill, it’s almost always books from Tier 1.

Tier 3: Highbrow

Audience: Seminarians, pastors, scholars, literary types, lay intellectuals.

Examples: Beth Felker Jones, Wendell Berry, Alan Jacobs, Fleming Rutledge, David Bentley Hart, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wesley Hill, Tara Isabella Burton, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Cornel West, Miroslav Volf, Stanley Hauerwas, Ross Douthat, Dorothy Sayers, James Cone, Zena Hitz, Francis Spufford, Jonathan Tran, Peter Leithart, Brian Bantum, James K. A. Smith, Esau McCaulley, Lauren Winner, Andy Crouch, Phil Christman, Luke Timothy Johnson, Rod Dreher, John Piper, Paul Griffiths, Tim Keller, Eugene Peterson, Justo L. González.

Genre: Textbook; magazine essay; popularization of academic scholarship; intellectual history; popular genealogy; political screed; think-tank intervention; “public discourse”/“public intellectual” writing; church-facing theological scholarship; work of interest to pastoral ministry; biblical commentary; public-facing scholarship; etc.

Available: Usually only online, aside from a few very famous authors.

Description: This level includes authors who write for a wide audience of non-specialists who are otherwise interested in serious intellectual and academic Christian thought. Think of books in this group as a way of making the insights of academic scholarship available to folks who either are not academics or, being academics, do not belong to the field in question. Likewise books in this tier imagine a lay reader without formal expertise but who has time, energy, and interest enough to devote themselves to understanding a book written with style about dense matters—like an amateur tinkerer dabbling in quantum mechanics. Such a reader is willing to do the work, but don’t treat her like she’s already a member of the guild. If she were, she wouldn’t need to read your book. Books in this category may have footnotes, longer sentences, a bigger page count, and a presumption of literary and historical background knowledge on the part of the reader. Or perhaps the work in question is a textbook written specifically for upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. There may be explanation going on, but it’s in the context of active teaching; it’s not the sort of book one would pick up and read for pleasure. Living writers that come to mind here often publish in highbrow “popular” venues like Commonweal or First Things or The New Atlantis or The Point or The New Yorker or The New York Times or The New Republic or The Atlantic. Readers are self-conscious, if a mite embarrassed, about their status as intellectuals and readerly readers. They expect nuance, expertise, credentials, even authority. Authors, in turn, supply them in spades.

Tier 4: Scholarly

Audience: Fellow scholars and academics as well as some pastors and few laypeople.

Examples: Kathryn Tanner, Justo L. González, Willie James Jennings, Katherine Sonderegger, Sarah Coakley, David Bentley Hart, James Cone, Jean Porter, Fleming Rutledge, Stanley Hauerwas, Frances Young, Luke Timothy Johnson, Miroslav Volf, Eleonore Stump, Jennifer Herdt, J. Kameron Carter, Francesca Murphy, Bruce Marshall, Linn Marie Tonstad, Kevin Hector, Jonathan Tran, Eric Gregory, Paul Griffiths, John Webster, Cornel West.

Genre: Monograph; dissertation; peer-reviewed journal article; scholarly tome; biblical commentary; etc.

Available: Online, university presses, campus bookstores, or academic conferences.

Description: This level includes academics producing professional scholarship for their peers. They have an audience of one: people like them. They do not define jargon; they revel in it. They do not transliterate, much less translate; they write in Greek or Sanskrit and assume you can read it as well as they can. Their pages are full of footnotes: the more the better. They are scholars writing for scholars, often hyper-specialized scholars inhabiting sub-sub-sub-fields (studying only a single book of the Bible, or a specific century in church history, or a particular doctrine like predestination). If any eavesdroppers want to find some profit in their work, they’re welcome to do so, but the content, style, genre, and assumed audience is unchanged: it’s academic. That’s not to say their books won’t have an impact. Their ideas, if good or interesting or widely received and accepted, will trickle down the tiers over the years and even decades until ordinary folks who have never heard of the source material will learn about or even share the ideas in question. That takes time, though, and has nothing to do with book sales. Academics don’t sell books. That’s not the business they got into. Someone or something else pays the bills, to the extent that they are paid. Which is why scholarly books so often do not appear to have been written with accessibility, style, or even clarity in mind. Other goods and ends are being sought (whether or not such a tradeoff is prudent or defensible).

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Okay. So those are the tiers. Here are some further notes and thoughts, in no particular order:

• If you’re thinking in terms of publishing and thus in terms of sales, we might put it this way: a Tier 4 book sells in the hundreds, a Tier 3 book in the thousands, a Tier 2 book in the tens of thousands, and a Tier 1 book (if successful by its own standards) in the hundreds of thousands.

• I did my best to duplicate names across tiers. I’m not aware of an author, at least a living author, who could reasonably be placed in all four tiers—unless, I suppose, you counted an author, like Lewis, who covered Tiers 2-4 and wrote fiction or children’s stories (and could thus be included in Tier 1). Regardless, although I listed a few dead authors, I tried to giving living examples.

• Who are the platonic ideals for each level? For Tier 1 I’d say Beth Moore or Max Lucado. For Tier 2 I’d say Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary, Ben Myers’ Apostles’ Creed, or John Mark Comer’s Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. For Tier 3 I’d say most everything Lewis and Chesterton wrote; among the living, think Tim Keller or Zena Hitz, Beth Felker Jones or Alan Jacobs. For Tier 4, I’d say just about any academic systematic theologian: Tanner, Sonderegger, Jennings, Tran, Herdt, et al.

• In my experience, when academics refer to “writing for a popular audience” or “writing a popular book,” what they mean is Tier 3, not Tier 2 (and certainly not Tier 1). Jamie Smith is a great example. Some of his scholarship on French continental philosophy is clearly Tier 4. Desiring the Kingdom is Tier 3. You Are What You Love is Tier 2. Early on in my teaching, I assigned DTK to upperclassmen in a gen-ed course. They drowned. Then YAWYL came out. Now I assign that instead, and even still they have a bit of trouble in later chapters—but they don’t drown. It’s at their level. They can tread water and occasionally swim a bit.

• For academics, then, our training seriously warps our ability to tell what kind of writing ordinary people—my term for non-academics—find accessible and engaging. There is a kind of Tier 3 writing, for example, that is full of rhetorical flourishes and feels, to a theologically trained academic, bracing and lovely and passionate and compelling. Hand it to a normie, though, and they can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s impenetrable. The sentences are long; the vocabulary is dense; the presumed audience is not “ordinary person with a day job.” We have to learn how to read with eyes other than our own.

• The fatal symptom of all failed “popular” writing by academics is jargon. The second is complex syntax. The third is the inability to make a simple point with a brief declarative sentence. The fourth is the presumption of all manner of background knowledge on the part of the reader, most of which she has never even heard of. If you’re an academic and you want to write for a wide audience, it’s these four things you must be purged of. (A fifth is name-dropping and ism-mongering. My students always tell me, when they read Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, that they get “lost in the names and dates.” You know you’re writing a Tier 3 book if you refer to “Eliot” or “Auden” or “Cardinal Newman” or even “Luther” without a first name and introduction. Them’s the facts, whether you like it or not.)

• I want to reiterate the point I made in my description of Tier 1 above: These are the books that American Christians read. They sell nearly all the copies; they speak at nearly all the events; they inform the minds and hearts of countless believers every day. Mourn it or celebrate it, it’s best to accept it. And some folks writing in Tier 1 are fantastic! I’ll not permit the name of Beth Moore besmirched in my presence. Just about every Christian woman in my extended family or home church has been reading, studying, and listening to Beth Moore for three decades. Praise God for that. (And if you haven’t read her memoir, get thee to Mardel pronto. Even better, listen to it on audio.) Nevertheless, it’s crucial to grasp that more people know who Sadie Robertson Huff is than, say, Tim Keller or Tish Warren. Sadie’s got five million followers on Instagram, for goodness’ sake. This is the world we live in.

• For people like me—meaning academics who’d like to write for as wide a popular audience as possible—Tier 2 is the sweet spot. My revised dissertation (published in 2022 with Eerdmans) is Tier 4. My doctrine of Scripture (published in 2021 with Cascade) is Tier 3: accessible to pastors, seminarians, and normies who want to stretch themselves. My next two books (more about those here) are Tier 2. They were both the most fun I’ve had writing and the most challenging to write. Why? Because I had to let go of all my crutches and shortcuts. I had to say in ten words what I’m used to saying in fifty. To say in four sentences what I want twelve for. To make a claim without a footnote defending me from attacks on all sides. To say something about God, Scripture, or the gospel that a Christian of any age who’s never read another theological book in her life could understand without a problem. It’s hard, y’all! And for that reason it’s really nice to work with editors who get it. Todd Hains at Lexham was a taskmaster, breaking down my four-line sentences into two; simplifying my syntax and diction; strangling my jargon; murdering my adverbs and adjectives; in general, killing my darlings. Thank God for Todd. Someone might actually read my book next year because of him. Get yourself an editor, or at least honest friends, who will tell you exactly how unreadable your “popular” writing is. Then get revising.

• Here’s a delicate topic that, I hope, I’ll be able to discuss with appropriate nuance and clarity. Because I have a lot to say about it, I’m going to leave the bullet points to make the point…

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In theology and Christian writing generally, it’s been a man’s game until the last half century or so. It hasn’t been a white man’s game, it’s important to note, since Christian writing from the beginning has come from places as diverse as north Africa, the middle East, Russia, eastern Europe, South America, and elsewhere. Even calling writing from Europe “white” is unhelpful, since it’s overly generic or anachronistic (or both). Saint Paul wrote in Greece and Saint Augustine in Hippo and Saint Leo in Rome and Saint Anselm in Britain and Saint Basil in Caesarea and Saint Athanasius in Egypt and Saint Cyril in Jerusalem and Saint Ephrem in Nisibis and Saint John in Damascus and Saint Teresa in Spain and Saint Thérèse in France—and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. It makes no sense to call such writers “white,” even if much that they wrote is part of the so-called “Western” inheritance or patrimony. Such a term fails to describe their literal skin color, and most of them lived before (and thus innocent of) the invention of race.

Having said that, just as there is a legitimate concern to create space, in scholarship as well as classroom syllabi, for women Christian writers, so there is a legitimate concern to create space for living Christian writers of color, particularly those who come from cultures or groups rendered marginal by the centuries-long dominance of white Christian voices in North American contexts. Stipulate with me that this concern is sincere, that it is legitimate, and that it is worthy of attention and support on Christianly specific grounds. Now think about my tiers of theological publishing above.

For the moment think only of women writers. It seems to me that women are most represented in Tier 1. It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if aggregate sales of Christian books favor women authors (though I have no idea if that’s true). I would guess that Tier 4 is where women are next most represented, in terms of authors of books published as a percentage of the whole group. After just a few generations, women swell the ranks of the theological disciplines, and the “big names” that define the field as just as likely to be women as men. (Again, this is anecdotal, but stick with me.)

My sense is that where women continue to be under-represented is in Tiers 2 and 3, and I would submit that Tier 2 is where there are fewest women authors. Allow that I may be right about this. Why might that be?

One reason is that women who enter the theological academy operate from a felt pressure, and often explicit advice, to prove their bona fides to their (predominantly male) colleagues. They do so by producing top-level scholarship without a trace of the popular in it.

Another reason is ordinary institutional pressures: T&P requirements.

A third reason, even following tenure, is a general sense (which applies to men too) that “real” scholarship never descends beneath Tier 3. Maybe you write a textbook. Maybe you “dumb down” your hyper-specialized research for non-experts within the academy. But you don’t try to appeal to the masses. You don’t write “for everyone.” You’re a scholar! That’s beneath us.

A fourth reason is a side effect of the success of women writers in Tier 1: a certain perception of what it means to be “a female Christian writer” who “writes for a [read: female] popular audience.” This isn’t just a genre. It’s a whole sensibility. There are unwritten rules here. You need a social media presence. You need to interact with your fans. You need pictures, and not just of you but of your family (ideally your beautiful children). You need to “let people in.” If you don’t, is anyone really going to buy your books or pay you to speak?

A fifth and final reason connects back to something I said in my description of Tier 2 books above: unlike in Tier 1, Tier 2 books trade on the credentials or authority of the author. But among Christians, men are far more likely to possess credentials, authority, or both. They’re more likely to be ordained; they’re more likely to be a pastor; they’re more likely to have graduated from seminary. That’s what makes a Tish Warren such a remarkable success story. When she published her first book, she was a proverbial “nobody” without a social media following, without a speaker circuit, without a tenure-track professorship. But she was an ordained priest. That, plus her ability to pack theological substance into clear and beautiful prose, made her something of a unicorn. Otherwise Tier 2 is almost all men.

Consider Tara Isabella Burton. Like Warren she’s another exception that proves the rule. To be honest, she’s more of a 2.5 than a 2.0 on my scale. Her books lie somewhere between “popular” and “highbrow.” My students have to work when they read them, though they do eventually make it out the other side, and they’re not upset with me (or her) when they do. Now notice: Burton has a doctorate in theology from Oxford—but she didn’t go the academic route. She became a religion journalist and a novelist. She mostly writes highbrow nonfiction in a public-intellectual vein, even as her two books about Christianity in America are just accessible enough to qualify as “assignable” to my twentysomething college students.

So here’s the thought I want to float. It’s two sided.

On one hand, suppose again that you’re a professor, like me, who assigns books to students. You’d like these books to be authored by a representative swath of humanity, not just white dudes. The books, however, have to be both readable and Christian; ideally belonging to Tier 2. Not just that, but at least in my context, they can’t be morally or theologically liberal; they need to be nonpartisan, mainstream, or traditional. I’m not assigning my students a book that denies the resurrection of Jesus, or one that assumes anyone with a brain is a socialist, or one that argues abortion is a moral good. I’m not even assigning a book that’s outright partisan in the sense that it presumes “no serious American Christian could vote for/against X.” Remember, I’m teaching 21-year-olds who’ve never heard the word “theology” or “ethics” before. They’re babies. And I live in west Texas. So no ideologically progressive books (which is not to say I don’t assign essays, excerpts, and chapters written by thinkers from across the political spectrum: I do).

Here’s my question for you. Remember that I’m a theologian in need of theological texts to assign in general-education undergraduate theology courses for majors in business, nursing, and education. These texts need to be squarely in Tier 2 (with one or two exceptions for quality Tier 3 books). What do you propose I assign? Which authors do you recommend? Who fits the bill?

The truth is, if you’re avoiding Tier 1 and Tier 4, and certainly if you’re avoiding Tier 3, your choices are profoundly, even shockingly limited. That realization is what generated this entire idea about the different tiers of Christian/theological publishing. I assign Warren and Burton in my classes. I assign Beth Felker Jones and Jemar Tisby and James Cone, too. In addition, my students can handle Barbara Brown Taylor, Lauren Winner, and (if they’re Bible/ministry majors) Fleming Rutledge. I’ll give them, as well, small doses of Kathryn Tanner or Frances Young or Ellen Charry. But the sweet spot, as I’ve learned, if I want students to dive deep, to gain from the reading, and not to resent me or the text, is Tier 2. And if you share the goal of assigning women as well as men, black authors as well as white (not to mention others), then there just aren’t that many to choose from—assuming living authors, assuming my other constraints, assuming my context, assuming my subject matter.

That’s a sour note to end on, so let me turn to the other side of the coin. If I were giving advice to a friend already in the academy or to a student just about to begin the long trek through graduate study toward a doctorate, here’s what I’d say. If you’re a woman or person of color and you have any interest at all in writing for an audience beyond the university, then begin preparing today for publishing a Tier 2 book. That’s where the market inefficiency is. That’s where the audience is. That’s where you can make a difference. Aim for any tier you please, but if your desire is to write for a popular readership and you also have the talent and institutional support to do so—it’s there for the taking. Have at it.

And while you’re at it, call me up on pub day. I’ll add your book to the syllabus on the spot.

A new book contract! And other coming attractions

It’s official!

This week I received and signed the contract for my next book. Eerdmans is publishing it, and the tentative publication date is late 2024. The title is Letters to a Future Saint: A Catechism for Young Believers. It is what it sounds like: an epistolary catechism intended for readers in their late teens or early twenties. Not an apologetics for nonbelievers, but a catechism for would-be believers, folks who’ve grown up in the church, or perhaps in its orbit, but are relatively ignorant about the ABCs of the Christian faith while hungry to learn more.

I drafted a good two-thirds of the book in a brief but intense span of time last year, then sat on it. Now that the contract’s official, the writing will re-commence forthwith. I hope to have a rough draft by this summer, and then it’ll be time to revise the manuscript to the death. I want this thing to be perfect—by which I mean, not perfect, but absolutely accessible to my intended audience, and not only accessible, but appealing, fascinating, stimulating, even converting. I want not one word out of place. So I’m sure I’ll be road-testing it on some students in the summer and fall.

I’ve known this was coming down the pike for a while, but I didn’t want to make an announcement until it was for sure. I couldn’t be more excited. I can’t wait to share the final product with the world. I hope it finds a real readership and makes a real difference, however modest.

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While we’re on the topic, here is a larger update on other writing projects, whether books or essays, imminent or far off.

–My first two books were published in the fall and spring of 2021 and 2022, respectively. The first was about the Bible. The second was about the Bible and the church. Book #3, not yet released, is about the church. (Are you sensing a theme?)

That book is written and in the hands of the publisher. It’s called The Church: A Guide to the People of God, and it will be the sixth entry in Lexham’s Christian Essentials series. The first five treat the Apostles’ Creed (Ben Myers), The Ten Commandments (Peter Leithart), The Lord’s Prayer (Wesley Hill), baptism (Leithart again), and the Bible (John Kleinig). I’ve read all of them, and each is fantastic. I’ve assigned more than one of them many times in classes. I’m honored to join the series. I’m eager to read the entry on the Eucharist, whoever ends up writing it!

The publication date for my entry on the church is TBD, but my guess is sometime between December 2023 and March 2024.

–Book #4 is my big news above, and as I said, I expect it to be released sometime between late 2024 and early 2025.

–Book #5 is not news, as I signed the contract nearly two years ago. It will likewise be with Lexham, in another series called Lexham Ministry Guides. The subtitle for the series and for each book in it is For the Care of Souls. Four have been published so far: on funerals, stewardship, pastoral care, and spiritual warfare.

My entry in the series will be on the topic of technology. Specifically, the role and challenge of digital technology in the life of pastoral ministry. It’s a topic close to my heart and one I’ve developed a class on here at ACU. The book will be midsize and written for ordained pastors in formal church ministry of some kind. I hope it will not be like other books of this sort. We shall see.

Anyway, I expect that book to be published in the spring or summer of 2026. And beyond that, while I have more book ideas germinating—one in particular, a “big” scholarly one—no contracts or hard plans are in place. I’d be surprised if I didn’t take a bit of a break after this one. After all, if everything goes according to plan, and God is so gracious as to permit it, I’ll have published five books in a stretch of about five years. That’s a lot. Readers, editors, and publishers will have to tell me at that point whether they want more from me, or whether that’s good enough, thank you very much.

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As for other writing…

–My most recent peer-reviewed journal article came out last fall. I don’t currently have another one teed up, but I do have an idea for one. I’m going to let it ruminate for a while. It’s about Israel, the church, the Torah, and Saint Paul.

–In the next print issue of Mere Orthodoxy I have an essay called “Once More, Church and Culture.” It’s a reflection on Christendom, America, Niebuhr, and James Davison Hunter. Not quite an intervention, but I do offer a constructive proposal.

–In the print edition of First Things I have a reflection forthcoming on what it means to do theology when the church is divided, as it is today. This one’s a long time coming, because it is an answer to a question I get all the time about my ecclesial identity. I’m pleased to see it in the magazine, a first for me.

–This summer I have a chapter in a book published by Plough on the liberal arts. The volume came out of the grant project I was a part of called The Liberating Arts. More on this one soon.

–This summer I am writing a chapter for a book due to be published in 2024 dedicated to the topic of teaching theology. I won’t say much more about it at the moment, but I’m positively giddy to be included in the volume. Anyone in theology will recognize pretty much every name in the collection—minus mine. I still can’t believe I was invited to contribute. And I love the idea of theologians writing about teaching, which is a practice too many of us were trained to avoid or at least to resent the necessity of.

–Later this month (or next), I’ll be part of a symposium in Syndicate on Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s new book The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything. Should be good fun.

–Later this spring I should have a review essay in The Christian Century on Mark Noll’s book America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization.

–Possibly this spring or summer I might have an essay in The Point that uses Wendell Berry’s new book on race, home, and patriotism as a point of departure. I’ve got the green light, but I also have to sit down and do the thing…

–In Restoration Quarterly I plan to publish an essay on churches of Christ, evangelicalism, and catholicity, building on and synthesizing my series here on the blog last summer/fall.

–In the Journal of Christian Studies I plan to write a defense of holy orders from and for a low-church context that spurns ordination and affirms the priesthood of all believers.

–In Comment I’ll be writing a review essay of Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Kudos to Brian Dijkema, editor extraordinaire, for nudging me into it.

–My review of Jordan Senner’s book on John Webster just came out in Scottish Journal of Theology.

–My review of David Kelsey’s Human Anguish and God’s Power is with the editors at the Stone-Campbell Journal; I imagine it’ll be published later this year.

–My review of Fred Sanders’ Fountain of Salvation is with the editors at Pro Ecclesia; should be published soon.

–Same for my review of R. B. Jamieson and Tyler Wittman’s Biblical Reasoning, to be published in the International Journal of Systematic Theology.

–I’ll soon be writing a (long) review of Konrad Shmid and Jens Schrötter’s The Making of the Bible for the journal Interpretation.

–I’ve already recorded an interview for the podcast The Great Tradition; the episode should drop by month’s end.

–I’m giving talks here and there, in Abilene and elsewhere, but nothing to advertise here.

And I think that’s it. For now. Thanks for reading. Much to come. Now back to work.

2022: reading

On its own terms, it was a solid year for reading. In terms of my goals, however, not so much. What with health, travel, and professional matters hoovering up all my attention from July to December, my reading plummeted in the second half of 2022. Last year I wrote about how, for years, I’d been stuck in the 90-110 zone for books read annually. Last year I climbed to 120. This year I hoped to reach 150. Alas, by the time Sunday rolls around I’ll have read 122 this year. At least I didn’t regress.

The environmental goals I made, I kept: namely, to cut down TV even more; to stick to audiobooks over podcasts; and to leaven scholarly theology with novels, nonfiction, poetry, and audiobooks. I make these goals, not because I value quantity over quality, nor because I want to read faster or just read a bunch of smaller books. It’s because setting these goals pushes me to set aside much less worthy uses of my time in order to focus on what is better for me and what I genuinely prefer. Both the direct effects (more reading) and the knock-on effects (less TV, less phone and laptop, less wasted time on mindless or mind-sucking activities) are what I’m after. And, as I’ve written before, I didn’t grow up reading novels. Which means I’m always playing catch-up.

My aspirational monthly goal is 2-3 novels, 2-3 volumes of poetry, 2-3 audiobooks, 3-4 nonfiction works, 4-8 works of academic theology. That alone should push me to the 140-160 range. I was on pace heading into August this year, then cratered. As 2023 approaches, I won’t make 150 my “realistic” goal; I’ll set it at 135. But one of my brothers as well as another friend both hit 200 this past year, which puts me to shame. So perhaps a little friendly competition will do the job.

In any case, what follows is a list of my favorite books I read this year. Two new books I was disappointed in: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and The Ink Black Heart, the sixth entry in J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series. I won’t write about the latter, but I might find time for the former. I also read J. G. Ballard’s Crash for the first time, a hateful experience. I “get” it. But getting it doesn’t make the reading pleasant, or even justify the quality of the book. I do plan to write about that one.

Here are the ones I did like, with intermittent commentary.

*

Rereads

5. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time.

4. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. Hadn’t picked this one up in 22 years. Magnificent.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I’m willing to call this a perfect book. I should probably read it every year for the rest of my life. Lewis really is a moral anatomist nonpareil.

2. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. Hadn’t read this one since middle school. Had completely forgotten about the technologies Bradbury conjured up as substitutes for reading—the very technologies (influencers live-streaming the manipulated melodrama of their own lives into ordinary people’s homes via wall-to-wall screens) we have used to the same end.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I could not remember when or whether I’d read this years and years ago, but I listened to Forest Whitaker’s rendition on Spotify and it was excellent. Highly recommended. (The audio recording; I know Douglass himself doesn’t need my stamp of approval.)

Poetry

I won’t pretend to have read as much poetry as I have in previous years. I finishing rereading R. S. Thomas’s poems; I got to a couple more collections by Denise Levertov; and I read Malcolm Guite’s The Singing Bowl, my first of his volumes. I’m hoping to get back into more poetry in the new year.

Fiction

10. William Goldman, The Princess Bride. Never knew Goldman wrote it as a book before it became a screenplay and a film. A delight.

9. John Le Carré, Silverview. A fitting send-off to the master.

8. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale. Brutality with flair. I wasn’t prepared for how good the prose, the plotting, the thematic subtext would all be. I wonder what would happen if, in the next film adaptation, they actually committed to adapting the character rather than a sanitized version of him. I’m not recommending that: Bond is wicked, and the Connery films valorized his wickedness. But the books commit to the bit, and it makes them a startling read some 70 years later.

7. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan. The second entry in the Earthsea saga. I expect to read the rest this year.

6. Walter Mosley, Trouble is What I Do. My second Mosley. Someone adapt this, please! Before picking it up, I had just finished a brand new novel celebrated by the literary establishment, a novel that contains not one interesting idea, much less an interesting sentence. Whereas Mosley is incapable of writing uninteresting sentences. He’s got more style in his pinky finger than most writers have in their whole bodies.

5. Mick Herron, Slow Horses & Dead Lions. I got hooked, before watching the series. Casting Oldman as Jackson Lamb, he who also played Smiley on film, is inspired. I expect to finish the whole series by summer. Herron isn’t as good as Le Carré—who is?—but his ability to write twisty plots in punchy prose that intersects politics without getting preachy: that’s a winning ticket.

4. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. My first Jackson. As good as advertised. Read it with some guys in a book club, and one friend had a theory that another friend who’d read the novel a dozen times had never considered. I’m still thinking about it.

3. Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. Wrote about it here.

2. Brian Moore, The Statement. I’ve never read anything like this novel. It floored me. James and Le Carré are my two genre masters, each of whose corpus I will complete sometime in my life. Moore may now be on the list, not least owing to his genre flexibility. I’ve read Catholics. I just grabbed Black Robe. Thanks to John Wilson for the recommendation.

1. P. D. James, The Children of Men. I’m an evangelist for this one. Don’t get me started. Just marvel, with me, that a lifelong mystery writer—who didn’t publish her first novel till age 40—found it within herself, in her 70s, to write a hyper-prescient work of dystopian fiction on a par with Huxley, Orwell, Ballard, Bradbury, and Chesterton. I would also add Atwood, since this novel is so clearly a Christian response to The Handmaid’s Tale. As ever, all hail the Queen.

Nonfiction

10. A bunch of books about liberalism, neoliberalism, and the right: Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism; Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal; Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents; Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind; Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences; Matthew Continetti, The Right.

9. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. Outstanding. Hat tip to Matthew Lee Anderson for the recommendation.

8. Christopher Hitchens, A Hitch in Time. A pleasure to dip back in to some of Hitch’s best work. But also a reminder, with time and distance, of some of his less pleasant vices.

7. James Mumford, Vexed & Yuval Levin, A Time to Build. Imagining life beyond tribalism, neither pessimistic nor optimistic. Just hopeful.

6. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks & Phil Christman, How to Be Normal. I wrote about Burkeman here. Christman is a mensch. Read both, ideally together.

5. Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story & Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.

4. Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel.

3. Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

2. Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush. He’s still got it. There are a couple essays here that rank among Berry’s best.

1. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. The best book of any kind I read in 2022. One of the best books I’ve ever read. A one of one. On a par with After Virtue, A Secular Age, and other magisterial table-setters. Except this one is half the size and happens to focus on Plenty Coups, the Crow, and the moral and philosophical grounds for continuing to live in the face of reasonable despair. Take and read.

Christian (popular)

8. John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life. Hand on heart, I’d never read a Piper book in my life. I wanted something short and punchy on audio, and this fit the bill. Turns out the man can preach.

7. John Mark Comer, Love-ology & The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry & Live No Lies. Hopped on the JMC train this year, since all of my students and many of my friends love his books. He’s doing good work. Pair him with Sayers, Crouch, Wilson, and Dane Ortlund, plus the younger gents at the intersection of Mere O, Davenent, and Theopolis—Meador, Loftus, Anderson, Roberts, Littlejohn, et al—and if you squint a bit, you can see the emerging writers, leaders, and intellectuals of a sane American evangelicalism, should that strange and unruly beast have a future. And if it doesn’t, they’re the ones who will be there on the other side.

6. Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery. Simply lovely.

5. Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church. Shrewd, lucid diagnosis. Not so sure about the prescription.

4. Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For. Click on the “Andy Crouch” tag on this blog and you’ll see tens of thousands of words spilled over this book as well as Andy’s larger project. A wonderful man, a great writer, a gift to Christian attempts to think and live wisely today.

3. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. I listened to this one on audio. I wept.

2. Andrew Wilson, Spirit and Sacrament. Just what the doctor ordered for my students.

1. Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender. The unrivaled summer beach read of 2022. No joke, I was at the beach in July and looked to my right and then to my left and saw more than one person reading it. You heard it here first.

Theology (newer)

15. Some books on Christian ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (by Victor Lee Austin), A Brief History (by Michael Banner), A Very Short Introduction (by D. Stephen Long).

14. Myles Werntz, A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence & From Isolation to Community. Two accessible entries from a friend on Christian pacifism and Christian community. Nab copies of both today!

13. Charlie Trimm, The Destruction of the Canaanites. See my review in Christianity Today.

12. David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse & You Are Gods.

11. Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human. Victor makes a case that friendship is not just the heart of being human, but the heart of the gospel; or rather, the latter because the former; or vice versa.

10. Fred Sanders, Fountain of Salvation. See my forthcoming review in Pro Ecclesia.

9. Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul. See my review in Modern Theology.

8. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, The Love That is God. This one will be on a syllabus very soon.

7. R. B. Jamieson and Tyler Wittman, Biblical Reasoning. See my forthcoming review in International Journal of Systematic Theology.

6. William G. Witt, Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. So far as I can see, immediately the standard work on the question. I’d love to see some good-faith engagements from the other side, both Protestant and Catholic.

5. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift & Paul and the Power of Grace.

4. Christopher Bryan, The Resurrection of the Messiah. Historical, textual, linguistic, literary, and theological scholarship at its finest.

3. Mark Kinzer, Searching Her Own Mystery. I learned a lot from this book. I try to read everything Kinzer writes on the topic of Israel, church, and messianic Judaism. Even better something focused on a particular text, in this case Nostra Aetate.

2. Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life. Pellucid and compelling. A beautiful vision that captures heart and mind both. Here’s a taste.

1. Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. What can I say? I have a thing for contrarian dating of the NT. I’m not at all persuaded by the consensus dating of most first-century Christian writings. Bernier updates John A. T. Robinson’s classic Redating the New Testament, with a clearly enunciated methodology deployed in calm, measured arguments that avoid even a hint of polemic. For that very reason, an invigorating read.

Theology (older)

6. A Reformation Debate: The Letters of Bishop Sadoleto and John Calvin. (Whispers: Calvin doesn’t win this round.)

5. Papal social encyclicals: Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, Humanae Vitae, & Lumen Gentium. Always worth a re-read.

4. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God & Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Beautiful, devotional, exemplary models of spiritual theology.

3. St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Church: Select Treatises & On the Church: Select Letters.

2. St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice. Blows your hair back then lights it on fire.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Is Ramsey the most underrated Anglophone theologian of the twentieth century? The man had exquisite theological sense; he wrote with style and passion; he cared about the unity of the church; he was a bona fide scholar; he wrote about everything; he became Archbishop of Canterbury; what’s not to love? Both this work and his little volume on the resurrection are classics.

Around the web

It’s been a happy last month, in terms of reviews and references across the web. I already linked in a previous post to the double-review of my two books on Scripture in Christian Century. Here are some other links and bits of news, gathered here, as in the olden days, on the blog, since I don’t have a Twitter or Facebook profile from which to share these things with the world:

• Cole Hartin reviews The Doctrine of Scripture in the latest Scottish Journal of Theology. He’s very kind, though he doesn’t think it’s perfect. He does call the book, and I quote, “jaunty” in the opening line of the review. Jaunty!

• Brandon Crowe reviews The Doctrine of Scripture in the latest issue of The Expository Times. He’s less enamored of the book, understandably so from his Reformed perspective. I do wish he might have found some virtues in the work, granted our theological disagreements. Though perhaps he didn’t find (m)any to speak of.

• I have it on good authority that reviews of The Doctrine of Scripture are imminently forthcoming in Stone-Campbell Journal, co-written by C. Leonard Allen and Lauren Smelser White, and in Pro Ecclesia, written by Brett Vanderzee. Also a review of The Church’s Book in The Expository Times by Gregory Vall. I’ve heard about others through the grapevine, but nothing as concrete or imminent.

• The week of Thanksgiving, Christianity Today published a short piece by Kaitlyn Schiess called “Thanks Be to God for Scripted Gratitude.” It references The Church’s Book alongside J. Todd Billings and Ellen Davis (not too shabby company, that) to talk about giving liturgical thanks for the reading of Scripture in worship. A former student of mine who follows Schiess pointed me to it. Lovely!

• On Thanksgiving Day, Comment published a wonderful essay by Caitrin Keiper, an editor at Plough and The New Atlantis I’ve had the pleasure to work with before. It’s called “Heartbeat of the World,” and uses her own story of giving birth to think about natality, motherhood, Christmas, and C-sections. She graciously quotes from my essay for Christian Century a few years back called “Birth on a Cross.” Very much worth a read.

• Back in April, Trevin Wax wrote a piece for The Gospel Coalition called “Bible Reading in an Age of Double Literacy Loss.” It uses my reflections on this blog about literal and biblical illiteracy as a point of departure for thinking about lay reading of the Bible today. Thanks to Trevin for a stimulating response.

• Finally, I noticed that, sometime after AAR/SBL/Thanksgiving, my second book—The Church’s Book (I know, I know, writing it out like that is so clunky)—which is usually a whopping $50, is now selling for a hair under $25. Buy it today! Even if it means patronizing the Bezos Beast. I’ll give you preemptive absolution, just this one time.

Rules for reviewing and being reviewed

Twelve rules for writing a book review:

1. The subject of the review should be the book and its ideas, not you or your ideas. If you are inclined to write a piece you could have written had you never read the book in question, beg off immediately.

2. Any reader of your review should know, after reading it, who the author is and in particular what the book is about.

3. A review should give the reader some taste of the prose, some sense of the voice of the author and not only the author as mediated by your voice.

4. The object of your review is the book as written, not the book as you would have written it.

5. If the review is under 1,000 words, then you do not have space to formulate either a wholesale critique of the book or an alternative argument. You have space, instead, for a few small criticisms or one main criticism.

6. Most books are bad, but few books are all bad. Find something positive to say about the book under almost any circumstances. (As Roger Ebert liked to say, don’t be parsimonious in your joy.)

7. It is all too easy to write a “take down.” Don’t do that. A book must be unremittingly wicked or dangerously foolish to merit the critical shotgun blast. And if you’re eager to pull the trigger, that’s a sign that you shouldn’t.

8. Be charitable: imagine why someone might think this book worth writing, exactly in the way it was written.

9. Be disinterested: if you have personal animus against the author or some reason to wish him or her ill, do not write the review. A reviewer is an arbiter, of merit and of preference, and the reader should be able to trust that the reviewer is a fair judge in the matter. Don’t be a hack.

10. Be critical, but not cheap. Hold the book to a high standard, but don’t go looking for flaws, and don’t view your review as an occasion to parade each of those flaws before the mocking eyes of a mob. If you expect the book to be substantive, hold yourself to the same standard; don’t suckerpunch an author under any conditions, but certainly not by means of a double standard.

11. If the form is a review essay, then your voice and views and arguments rightly enter the field of play. But it remains a review essay, not an essay simpliciter. Your many tangents, comments, and reflections ought to circle or spiral around the subject and substance of the book, intersecting at crucial moments. All of the above still applies; in fact, it applies more stringently. The review essay is a longer leash, but a tighter one.

12. In sum: Review unto others as you would have them review unto you.

Twelve rules for being reviewed:

1. To be read, by anyone, for any reason at all, is an honor and a privilege. Most authors go their whole lives without an audience to speak of. Be grateful.

2. To be reviewed is therefore a double honor. Not just an individual reader but multiple people—with busy lives, deadlines, finite attention, not to mention editorial demands, publication schedules, and a readership of some sort—decided that your book was worthy of public attention. Get down on your knees and thank God!

3. A review is not a personal comment on the quality of your character. It is not an expression of like or dislike. It is not an act of friendship or unfriendship. It is an intellectual (possibly scholarly) assessment of the quality of your writing: its style, its substance, its contribution to the world of letters and ideas. Receive it as such.

4. Do not write, give up the writing life altogether, if you fear or resent or otherwise cannot handle being reviewed. It is a vulnerable and often nasty experience. Being an author is not for you if you are, shall we say, a touchy person. Defensiveness is never a good look, but for authors—whose entire job description is assessing others (and their ideas) and being assessed (for the same)—it is a sorry state indeed.

5. A bad review is not the end of the world. It is to be expected. It is the ordinary run of things. It may hurt. But for a writer, getting a bad review is just another Tuesday. Likely as not, the review won’t matter. Sometimes, bad press is good press. Sometimes, even, the reviewer might be onto something.

6. A largely positive review that includes modest criticism is not a bad review. Every author wants adulation and affirmation. But even the best reviews place some question mark here or there next to the book’s claims. Charles Taylor and Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Ehrenreich and Mary Karr are allowed to expect “Good Reviews.” (Though, to be clear, all of them have gotten bad reviews!) You and I are not.

7. Because you are not a perfect writer and no one has ever written a perfect book, you should not only be unsurprised by criticisms of your work, you should expect and even welcome them. Go into a review presupposing the reviewer to be a good-faith interlocutor. What might they have to teach you, including about your own work? Probably not nothing. Learn!

8. Credentials will not save you. Do not use them as a crutch or as a lifeline. It doesn’t matter what letters run after your name or how many degrees hang on your wall. “Experts” write bad books all the time. No one is disregarding your training by suggesting your work needs improvement. (Don’t you agree that it does?)

9. Do not go reading in between the lines. Do not impute to the reviewer something that he or she has not put down in black and white. Do not suggest ulterior motives; do not conjure unstated beliefs; do not make accusations of malice. Do not go on the hunt for reasons to justify yourself in the court of public opinion. Most important, do not take the review as a personal slight, as though the reviewer has done you an injustice. That is a category mistake. Reviewers may be—they are allowed to be and sometimes encouraged to be—mean, caustic, brutal, uncouth, biting, sarcastic, disparaging, dismissive. Are you surprised? Welcome to the world of writers!—just about the most insecure, miserable, miserly, skeptical, and suspicious crew around. They are not easily pleased. You are unlikely to prove an exception.

10. If you receive a genuinely, objectively disingenuous review, a vicious piece of spite animated by everything but an unbiased evaluation of your work—then kindly ignore it. If you have the will power, don’t read it; if you do read it, don’t give it a second’s thought, don’t share it with others, don’t write about it, don’t reply to it, don’t respond in kind. Pretend that it doesn’t exist, that it was never written. Any such review wants your blood up as a result: that’s why it was written in the first place. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Like the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest, does an unfair, ugly review exist if the author doesn’t promote it and the world doesn’t read it? Answer: No. So don’t feed the trolls.

11. Where do trolls live and move and have their being? On Twitter, and social media generally. The most important thing you can do, then, is to delete every one of your social media accounts, Twitter above all. I repeat: Get. Off. Twitter. Twitter is poison, but it’s an addictive poison for writers. In truth, it’s nothing but an endless diet of empty calories for attention-starved, affirmation-seeking scribblers. But it never leaves you full. It just makes you hungrier and looking the worse for wear. For not only is it a giant waste of time. Not only does it steal your focus and rob your capacity for sustained, thoughtful attention. Not only does it warp your sense of the world. It’s bad for your writing. Without exception, every writer who spends time on Twitter is worse for it. So the very best thing you can do, hands down, is log off entirely, and for good.

12. But since there will, alas, continue to be writers either who suppose Twitter is good for them (I’ve never met one of these in the wild, but I’m told they exist) or (more likely) who know it’s bad but see certain benefits as personally or professionally indispensable, here’s how to navigate being reviewed on Twitter:

    1. Follow rules 1-11 above; they still apply in full.

    2. Always and only express gratitude for being reviewed at all.

    3. Share links indiscriminately, and don’t prejudice readers with passive aggressive framing.

    4. No matter what, do not make Twitter a therapist’s couch for your wounded ego. It is impossible to overstate how sad and pitiable this is. Come feel sorry for me—a review of my work was mildly critical! It even used a mean tone and a loud voice! Unfair, am I right? Get over yourself. The very fact that your instinct is to run to Twitter or Instagram to fish for compliments and bask in your followers’ pity party is prima facie evidence that the review in question was on to something. You are earning no one’s respect, and only confirming priors you’d rather not confirm. Avoid this at all costs.

    5. Do not use any review as an opportunity to hold an online referendum on the character, integrity, or credentials of the reviewer or of the venue in which the review appeared. Remember, apart from the merits of such a question or of the quality of a particular review or of your feelings in response to it: your followers constitute an echo chamber. There is no reason to listen to anything they have to say—even more than you, they are likely to perceive written criticism as a personal affront rather than what it is: business as usual. The temptation is great, certainly if you have a bona fide following or sizable readership. But don’t give in. Resistance is not futile.

    6. The sad fact is that (a) popular authors have modeled this habit for up-and-coming writers as an unquestioned norm rather than as a cautionary tale; (b) this trend is itself the leading symptom of the poor health that besets the current writing–reviewing(–academic–journalist–publication) ecosystem; (c) following the trend, rather than avoiding it, perpetuates the very dysfunction everyone is suffering from and seeking relief from. It’s certainly true that an individual writer opting out makes only a minor difference, maybe no difference at all in the grand scheme of things. But there’s no reason to be part of the problem, once you know it’s a problem. And opting out will absolutely make a difference to you: your writing, your mental and emotional health, and much else besides. So get out while you can, if you can. You won’t regret it.

I’m in LARB on Hauerwas, Barth, and Christendom

This morning Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay review of mine on Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book, which came out earlier this year, titled Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth. Here is the opening paragraph:

THIS YEAR STANLEY Hauerwas turns 82 years old. To mark the occasion, he has published a book on Karl Barth, who died at the same age in 1968. The timing as well as the pairing is fitting. Barth is the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, and probably the most widely read of any theologian over the last 100 years. As for Hauerwas, since the passing of Reinhold Niebuhr in 1971, he has been the most prolific, influential, and recognizable Christian theological thinker in American public life. Barth somehow graced the cover of Time magazine in 1962, even though he was a Swiss Calvinist whose books on technical theology are so thick they could stop bullets. Hauerwas has never made the cover, but in 2001 Time did call him “America’s best theologian.” That fall, Oprah even invited him onto her show. In short, given Hauerwas’s age and stature, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth has the inevitable feel of a valediction.

Click here for the rest.

This is now my fifth time writing for LARB; the first came in the fall of 2017. It is never not a pleasure. It’s a challenge writing about Christian theology for a highbrow audience that is neither religious nor academic—but one I’ve learned to relish. Usually my essays there come in between 4,000 and 5,000 words, but this one is shorter, at about 2,000. I hope it does both Hauerwas and Barth honor; I try to use the occasion to raise some important issues. Enjoy.

I’m on the Crackers & Grape Juice podcast

Back in May Jason Micheli was kind enough to have me on the Crackers & Grape Juice podcast to talk about The Church’s Book. I’ve known about the C&GJ pod since they had Robert Jenson on in 2017, only months before he died. Jason believes in avoiding the Q&A format of typical interviews and just having a conversation, and that’s just what we did; it was a blast. I hope y’all enjoy.

One note: If you listen to the end—and maybe don’t—I was clearly unprepared for his rendition of James Lipton’s famous questionnaire (which, as a onetime faithful viewer of The Actors’ Studio, I appreciated!). My answers for favorite and least favorite word are, to put it kindly, asinine. Feel free to roll your eyes. Then forgive me. From now on I’ll know what to say. If I’m ever on again, I’ll be locked and loaded with answers that appear off the cuff but that are actually carefully prepared and scripted.

It’s a vice, hating to sound dumb. The Spirit is ever at work, one minor humiliation at a time.

On pastors embarrassed to say the great word “God”

Inside the immanent frame, there is a sneaky temptation for the pastor. She is often tempted, and somehow invisibly formed, to take God less seriously than her people do. The pastor can feel embarrassed to say the great word “God” or to even see the word “God” as a great word. Inside the invisible immanent frame, the word “God” feels meaningless, even immature. The pastor feels the temptation to run the congregation as a small business, even a little self-conscious of all the enchantment and dogma. But her people, who more directly bear the contradictions of modernity, and at times spit out the dry sawdust of the immanent frame, yearn to know that God has a purpose for their lives. They yearn to know that God can still speak. Secretly, and maybe with a little shame, the pastor finds herself doubting this, wanting at least one foot to rest squarely inside modernity, fearing she’ll be overtaken by superstition. The moral vision of immanence becomes more tempting for her than for her people.

—Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (2022), 31. Preach, brother.

The vanity of theologians

The love of God in Christ is the model of all good theological work. That is Barth's basic thesis: “If the object of theological knowledge is Jesus Christ and, in him, perfect love, then Agape alone can be the dominant and formative prototype and principle of theology.” Yet who among us would claim to consistently meet this standard? It is one thing to agree that teaching ought to be an act of self-emptying love on behalf of students, but quite another to teach that way. And while each of us falls short of this ideal in our own ways, Barth draws our attention to an especially corrosive vice that commonly infects us. The illness presents as, among other things, an excessive concern for our reputations; a morbid craving for praise; a narcissistic pretentiousness combined with insecurity; a relentless desire to outdo our colleagues and to broadcast our accomplishments; a loveless envy when others succeed; and a gloomy anxiety about our legacies, about how people will remember and evaluate us when we're dead. The vice, of course, is vanity, and Barth considers it a menacing threat to theologians.

To put it simply, Barth thinks a vain theologian is an embodied contradiction of the gospel and the very antithesis of Jesus Christ himself. And he doesn't care how obvious this is. Barth doesn't care that making fun of self-important theologians is by now a tired cliché. He knows that vanity disables us, and because of that he is willing to sound the alarm. And we would do well not to evade his critique by dismissing it as moralistic or judgmental or whatever. . . .

It is tempting to interpret passages like these as nothing more than Barth's way of deflecting the ocean of praise that was being directed at him toward the end of his life. He was, after all, the most famous theologian in the world. When he traveled to America to give the first five lectures in Evangelical Theology, Time magazine put him on its cover. Or perhaps one sees in these statements a tacit admission that Barth did not always manage to live up to his own standards, and that is certainly true. But Barth is aiming these passages at us too, and only an instinct for self-protection would lead us to think otherwise. Because if he wasn't troubled by our desire for greatness, he wouldn't aggressively remind us that we are nothing more than “little theologians.” He wouldn't criticize us for being more interested in the question “Who is the greatest among us?” than we are in the “plain and modest question about the matter at hand.” If he wasn't worried about the way we inflate ourselves by demeaning our rivals, he wouldn't ask why there are “so many really woeful theologians who go around with faces that are eternally troubled or even embittered, always in a rush to bring forward their critical reservations and negations?” And he wouldn't keep reminding us that evangelical theology is modest theology if he wasn't distressed by our immodesty—by the serenely confident way we make definitive pronouncements, even as we theoretically agree that all theological speech is limited and subject to revision. You don't write passages like the ones in this book unless you are concerned by how easily theologians confuse zealous pursuit of the truth with zealous pursuit of their own glory. It would not be far off to say that Barth's examination of this theme is something like a gloss on Jesus’s claim that you cannot simultaneously work for praise from God and praise from people. You can seek one or the other, but not both.

It is important to see that Barth is not taking cheap shots at theologians here. Yes, he is giving us strong medicine, but he is giving it to us because he thinks vanity turns us into the kind of people whose lives obscure the truth people who make the gospel less rather than more plausible. We cannot, of course, make the gospel less true. God is God, and the truth is the truth, and nothing we do can change that. But Barth understands the role that the existence of the community plays in both the perception and concealment of truth. “The community does not speak with words alone,” he writes. “It speaks by the very fact of its existence in the world.” There's what we say, and then there's who we are, and who we are says something.

And the connection with teaching is obvious. We believe that God sometimes uses flawed and sinful people like ourselves to make himself known. Since those are the only kind of people there are, those are the kind God uses. But how compelling could it possibly be for our students to hear us say, for example, that the Christian life is a life of self-giving that conforms to Jesus Christ's own life, or that the church lives to point away from itself to its Lord, when at the same time they see us carefully managing our CVs, ambitiously seeking acclaim and advancement, and morbidly competing with one another in exactly the same cutthroat ways that people in every academic discipline compete with one another? It doesn't add up. Arcade Fire is right: it’s absurd to trust a millionaire quoting the Sermon on the Mount. And it’s no less absurd for students to trust vain theologians when they talk about a crucified God. 

I know this is not everyone's problem. Some readers don't need to hear this. They struggle with other vices. But anyone who has read the Gospels knows that Jesus goes out of his way to address this problem. Speaking specifically about teachers, he says, “They do all their deeds to be seen by others. . . . They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats . . . and to be greeted with respect . . . and to have people call them [teacher]. . . . [But] the greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt. 23:1–12). In Luke 14 Jesus tells his disciples that following him requires giving up their possessions, and for many of us, the possession we covet most, the thing we cling to like greedy misers, is our reputation.

—Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith (Baker Academic, 2019), 64-70

Burkeman’s atelic self-help

Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is well worth your time. It is a splendid meditation on what it means to be a finite creature and what follows for making decisions, down to the most mundane, about how to spend one’s vanishingly small allotment of hours in this, our only world, with this, our only life. Like all Burkeman’s writing, the book is crisp, clear, well-researched, offered to the reader with a sincere smile of solidarity as well as a light touch. Like his other exercises in anti-self-help, Four Thousand Weeks is a gold mine for people obsessed with productivity, self-improvement, and endless to-do lists. That gold mine has a simple goal: for such people to cut it out. That is, to accept their limitations and to do what they are able, with pleasure, in the time they have with the people they love and the values they affirm. For the efficiency-obsessed, this message is doubtless a necessary tonic.

As I approached the end of the book, however, a single glaring weakness stuck out to me. It is a weakness shared by other entries in the genre today, including the very best. That weakness is simply put.

Neither Burkeman nor his other self-help authors can tell us the purpose or meaning of life.

Now, that may sound like rather unfair criticism. Who among us can articulate the purpose or meaning of life? Must it fit in a tweet? Be reducible to clickbait? How about the long title of a memoir?

But no, I’m not being unfair. Here’s why.

Burkeman wants his readers to see two things. First, that our lives are far shorter, far more limited, far less consequential, in a sense far less significant than we usually want to admit. We will almost certainly make no lasting difference in the world. The world will keep on spinning; the human race and/or the earth and/or the universe will endure perfectly well in our absence.

And that is true. But Burkeman goes on, second, to insist that this dose of reality is not (or should not be) depressing or frightening. Rather, it is a revelation, and a liberating one at that. It frees me from my narcissistic and false sense of my own self-importance. It bursts the bonds of my illusion of infinitude. Emancipated to see and accept my limits, I am enabled thereafter (and thereby) to live within them. And surely to live within the hard limits that bracket my life, whether or not I believe in them, is a recipe for happiness by comparison to the alternative.

But that “surely” is doing a lot of work in the previous sentence. Burkeman provides not one reason to suppose that human beings are built for happiness, living in accordance with our finitude or otherwise. Perhaps, instead, we have been programmed by natural selection to live a lie, the lie being our unbound immortality, and only so long as we believe in that are we (a) satisfied and/or (b) maximally productive. Perhaps we achieve great things only when we believe falsehoods about ourselves, our desires, or the world as a whole. Burkeman appears to be agnostic or atheist himself, which means that he must believe this to some extent. For most of civilization’s highest accomplishments—in music, art, architecture, and so on—have been conceived and produced by communities driven by zeal for God, for transcendence, for eternal life. Are we in a position to know, even and especially if we are secular believers in no intrinsic purpose apart from what remains after natural selection has done its work, that such ostensible illusions are not the requisite (false) premises for human and cultural greatness, not to mention happiness?

The answer is No, we are not. But there is more to say.

*

Burkeman rightly remarks on the pleasures of “atelic” practices. Walking in the woods, for example. There is no “point” to such a walk except the walk itself. It doesn’t lead to a product; there is no “winning” at such an endeavor. It is nothing but itself, and experiencing it is the only point of the practice: the telos is the doing of it, not something beyond or following it.

The problem is that Burkeman supposes, or assumes, that life is atelic: that the meaning of life lies not beyond itself, for it is its own point. The purpose of being human, on this view, is just the doing of it: to be human. But this doesn’t work, even on Burkeman’s own terms. There are at least three reasons why.

First, if an ordinary human being asks, What is the point or meaning of life?, it is inadequate to answer, The living of life. For the premise of the seeker’s question is that something beyond one’s life gives that life meaning, or purpose, or a point. So unless one is satisfied to reject the terms on which the question is asked, something more is required.

Second, then, Burkeman might have recourse to a constructivist answer: namely, that the purpose of one’s life is what one decides that purpose is. So the question remains meaningful but is turned back on the asker: Well, what do you value? But this answer fails in multiple respects. For one, it makes life’s meaning arbitrary, even relative. By the same token it suggests a fearsome causal sequence, as if the meaning of my life were what I value, and what I value is what makes it meaningful. In other words, my apparently random act of valuing (whether received from my genetic and social inheritance or chosen autonomously as a mature adult) carries an impossible burden: to create life-level significance where there is none in itself.

Does Burkeman, or anyone else in the self-help crowd, believe that ordinary human beings are capable not only of this purpose-conferring power but of self-consciously wielding it, that is, of engaging knowingly in making their lives teleological from within? As a matter of fact, while plenty of that crowd does believe this, I don’t think Burkeman does. But then, whence his confidence in essentially atelic normies self-bestowing meaning on their otherwise meaningless lives, underwritten by the active self-awareness that they are doing so while they are doing so?

This is not even to mention that, absent some antecedently given and shared human telos—some basic but substantive account of the goods and ends common to human life—“what I value” or “what I make the point of my existence” or “what I find meaningful in human life” or “what I want to spend my 4,000 weeks doing” may with perfect consistency be evil. Perhaps my self-constructed telos is serial murder, or ferocious avarice, or treating women like objects to be used and disposed of, or belittling children, or making the earth uninhabitable for future generations. When “the good” is a function solely of my own will, it is transmogrified into something called “value,” which is just another name for whatever I happen to want, prefer, or take pleasure in. The realm of “values” is paradise lost, which is to say, it is hell; as Milton has Satan declare:

All hope excluded thus, behold, instead
Of us, outcast, exiled, his new delight,
Mankind, created, and for him this World!
So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new World, shall know.

Third and finally, therefore, Burkeman has no answer or antidote to despair. It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that I’ve written about Burkeman once before, in a post responding to his review of a book by Jordan Peterson. I note the very same problem there. Burkeman seems genuinely not to countenance the seriousness of the problem of despair, precisely as a philosophical or theological problem. Imagine a young man who reads Burkeman’s book and finds himself persuaded that life is short, each of us is unimportant, and the whole shebang is without any meaning except what we bootstrap for ourselves. Far from embracing limits and finding, to his pleasant surprise, that he is even more economically productive than before, he kills himself instead. After all, he came to the conclusion that life is meaningless, and his self-assessment was just: he was neither impressive nor sufficiently special to manufacture enough meaning to get on with life without unmitigated pain, self-loathing, and anguish. Best to avoid that, all things considered. Whom will it affect, anyway? The universe goes on, without so much as a flinch.

There is not a doubt in my mind that such a scenario would fill Burkeman, who seems enormously decent and thoughtful, with sadness, compassion, and lament. Obviously he does not want anyone to commit suicide, not least someone who reads his book. He intends his message, as I said above, to be one of freedom, not bondage.

But I see no reason, given the parameters of his project, to forestall the judgment that atelic finitude is a cause for despair rather than joy. Why view limits as anything other than chains? Many people have seen them as just that, including some of the wisest of our writers and thinkers. Indeed more than a few of them, consistent with their principles, chose suicide as young or middle-aged men and women for this very reason: to escape the bonds of life, which held them in sway the way a despot might. Only by forcing death’s hand could they exert real agency in the sole respect that mattered: how and when one goes out, and on whose terms.

I don’t mean to pick on Burkeman (who in any case is safe and secure from being picked on by anyone, let alone me). Every other self-help and productivity guru is far, far more liable to the charges I’ve laid out than he is. But in another way he is the most guilty of this lacuna, because his book takes on board many of the ideas that despairing, existentialist, relativistic, constructivist, and nihilistic philosophers have proffered throughout the last two centuries. So he ought to know better. Yet he seems honest-to-God incurious about the fork in the road he constantly faces. The reader knows that he sees it as a fork, because whenever he comes to it, he reassures the reader, in assertive and consoling tones, that the annunciation of their atelic finitude is good news rather than bad. That implies the possibility of interpreting it as bad. Yet apart from his own confidence and kindness, we are provided no reasons to share his cheerful demeanor, at least no reasons that are not question-begging or that do not fall prey to the criticisms outlined above.

*

Two dissonances mark the book from beginning to end, and it is these dissonances that illuminate, not to say justify, the book’s failure to reckon with the terrifying possibility (a) that life is in fact meaningless or (b) that some, perhaps many, people, faced with a life made meaningful only by their own self-generated efforts, would judge it to be meaningless (whether or not they would be right to do so). Those dissonances are politics and religion.

Burkeman’s politics are clearly left-liberal, if of a moderate bent. Numerous times he admirably allows the convictions to which he has honestly come, about finitude and the unknown future and the relative unimportance of my or your life in the grand scheme of things, to override or modify political convictions he might once have believed or might, in the present, feel social pressure to maintain. Nevertheless, there are odd occasional interruptions of his otherwise steady emphasis on that one tiny sliver of a time-bound life you and I have to live. These interruptions almost always concern what he calls (always with nodding approval) “activism,” but especially climate change. It seems to me that he needs it to be true not only that the earth today is in dire straits (a premise I have no reason to doubt or dismiss) but also that urgent cooperative political action on its behalf, namely, making every effort to keep it from becoming worse, makes intuitive and even self-evident sense. But the truth is that it does not. Not, at least, on his own terms, terms he believes you and I may and ought to share. There are quite a few additional premises, premises that might call into question some of his own, required to cross that particular logical finish line. Yet he seems not to notice. Why?

I think it has something to do with his calmly but firmly non-religious beliefs. I call them “non-” rather than “anti-” religious because he doesn’t have an axe to grind against religion, and he is laudably open-minded about learning from religious and spiritual authors. (The self-help crowd may be alone among our public-facing and popular writers to read religious and theological texts seriously.) For example, I was delighted to see Burkeman quote Walter Brueggemann’s book on the Sabbath. He is also an avid reader of Buddhists and other adherents of Eastern, non-Abrahamic, and spiritual-not-religious thinkers. Again, I say, this is all to the good.

Burkeman himself, though, is non-religious, or at least presents himself as such. There is no God, at least one we may know or name. There is no afterlife. There is no soul, no eternity, no transcending the confines of this life, this world, these 4,000 weeks. Now Burkeman makes no arguments for this perspective, nor even alludes to them. He takes it for granted. So far as I can tell, he takes it for granted not only for himself or his readers but for all “modern” people living in the secular West.

That’s fine. He’s certainly not obliged to be a believer, or even to take seriously the counterclaims of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology. But I do think the shortcomings of his book would be alleviated were he to do so. He would see that it is not obvious that a finitude absent God and ruled by death is a live worth living, much less a life capable of being made meaningful by one’s own labors. In this St. Paul and Nietzsche are of one mind. If Christ is not raised, Christians of all people are most to be pitied. Why? Because, as Paul says only a few verses later, death is the enemy of God—the “last” enemy, as he puts it—which means that death is the enemy of life, for God is the source and sustainer of life. Life without God is life without life. Or as St. Augustine puts it (anticipating Heidegger, but drawing a different conclusion), life defined by the inevitability and overawing power of death is not so much a life lived toward death as itself a living death. Which is no life at all.

That is why Burkeman is wrong to agree with the climate activist Derrick Jensen that life without hope is the only life we have, such that hopelessness is a spur to living life to the full rather than a sap to life’s vitality. To write such a thing is to betray a profound ignorance of actual human beings. Even if it were true—that is, even were it an undeniable and objective fact that there is no God, no hope, no meaning in life except what we construct of it and for it—it would be a recipe for despair for most of us, for all but the most heroic, most stoic, most self-possessed. Whether or not that tells us anything about the proposition’s likely truth or falsehood, to suppose that it is actually, really, believe-me-I’m-giving-it-to-you-straight a relief from unhappiness is pure folly. I share with Burkeman the premise that the truth sets one free. But I have grounds for believing it. He does not. His philosophy desperately wants, even needs, objective truth and personal happiness to be positively correlated. They may not be, however. The relationship between them might be inverted: the more of one the less of the other. Maybe there is no relationship at all. Best to face that uncomfortable fact, to admit it at the outset as an ineliminable question mark set next to all of one’s most cherished hopes.

But then, that would be to admit that hope is irreducible to the act of making sense of human life. And not only hope, but the irreducibly given. If we creatures who by nature not only pursue happiness but seek the truth, then we discover a telos within ourselves driving us beyond ourselves toward that which lies before, behind, and above us. The truth satisfies because and only because (a) it is other than us and (b) we were made to know it. That is, we were made for it. And it turns out that “it” is not an object but a person. St. Augustine was right all along; humans are teleological—rational, desiring, social, liturgical—creatures who, furthermore, cannot help themselves. We are not past saving, though. We just need to know where to look. Augustine knew. And so he prayed:

To praise You is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

The endorsements are in for The Church’s Book!

My second book, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context, will be published on April 26. That’s just three months away—fourteen weeks from Tuesday, if anyone’s counting. And if you are, pre-order it today! From Eerdmans, from Amazon, from Bookshop … wherever you prefer.

I first pitched the idea for this book to my doctoral advisor ten years ago this month. I finished the eventual dissertation in 2017, five years ago. And after what feels like ten thousand paper-cut edits—not to mention garden shears–sized snips in between machete-hacking cuts—the book is ready to be released into the world. Going into the Christmas break, the revisions were approved; the manuscript was typeset; the indexes were complete. Since then I’ve been waiting for the last piece of the puzzle, namely the endorsements. And they came in this week!

Without further ado, then, here are the blurbs. If you, like me, swoon in disbelief, know that you are not alone.

*

“How we understand the church determines how we understand Scripture. Brad East grounds this basic claim in a detailed examination of three key heirs of Barthian theology—Robert Jenson, John Webster, and John Howard Yoder. The corresponding threefold typology that results —church as deputy (catholic), church as beneficiary (reformed), and church as vanguard (believers’ church)—offers much more than a description of the ecclesial divides that undergird different views of Scripture. East also presents a sustained and well-argued defense of the catholic position: church precedes canon. At the same time, East’s respectful treatment of each of his theological discussion partners gives the reader a wealth of insight into the various positions. Future discussions about church and canon will turn to The Church’s Book for years to come.”
— Hans Boersma, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

“Theologically informed, church-oriented ways of reading Scripture are given wonderfully sustained attention in Brad East’s new book. Focusing on Karl Barth and subsequent theologians influenced by him, East uncovers how differences in the theology of Scripture reflect differences in the understanding of church. Ecclesiology, East shows, has a major unacknowledged influence on remaining controversies among theologians interested in revitalizing theological approaches to Scripture. With this analysis in hand, East pushes the conversation forward, beyond current impasses and in directions that remedy deficiencies in the work of each of the theologians he discusses.”
— Kathryn Tanner, Yale Divinity School

“In this clear and lively volume, Brad East provides acute close readings of three theologians—John Webster, Robert W. Jenson, and John Howard Yoder—who have all tied biblical interpretation to a doctrine of the church. Building on their work, he proposes his own take on how the church constitutes the social location of biblical interpretation. In both his analytical work and his constructive case, East makes a major contribution to theological reading of Scripture.”
— Darren Sarisky, Australian Catholic University

“If previous generations of students and practitioners of a Protestant Christian doctrine of Holy Scripture looked to books by David Kelsey, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Kevin Vanhoozer as touchstones, future ones will look back on this book by Brad East as another. But there is no ecclesially partisan polemic here. This book displays an ecumenical vision of Scripture—one acutely incisive in its criticism, minutely attentive in its exposition, and truly catholic and visionary in its constructive proposals. It has the potential to advance theological discussion among dogmaticians, historians of dogma, and guild biblical exegetes alike. It is a deeply insightful treatment of its theme that will shape scholarly—and, more insistently and inspiringly, ecclesial—discussion for many years to come.”
— Wesley Hill, Western Theological Seminary

“In the past I’ve argued that determining the right relationship between God, Scripture, and hermeneutics comprises the right preliminary question for systematic theology: its ‘first theology.’ Brad East’s The Church’s Book has convinced me that ecclesiology too belongs in first theology. In weaving his cord of three strands (insights gleaned from a probing analysis of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder), East offers not a way out but a nevertheless welcome clarification of where the conflict of biblical interpretations really lies: divergent understandings of the church. This is an important interruption of and contribution to a longstanding conversation about theological prolegomena.”
— Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“For some theologians, it is Scripture that must guide any theological description of the church. For others, the church’s doctrines are normative for interpreting Scripture. Consequently, theologians have long tended to talk past one another. With unusual brilliance, clarity, and depth, Brad East has resolved this aporia by arguing that the locus of authority lay originally within the people of God, and thus prior to the development of both doctrine and Scripture. And so it is we, the people of God, who are prior, and who undergird both, and thereby offer the possibility of rapprochement on that basis. East’s proposal is convincing, fresh, and original: a genuinely new treatment that clarifies the real issues and may well prepare for more substantive ecumenical progress, as well as more substantive theologies. This is a necessary book—vital reading for any theologian.”
— Nicholas M. Healy, St. John’s University

“All of the discussions in this book display East’s analytical rigor and theological sophistication. As one of the subjects under discussion in this book, I will speak for all of us and say that there are many times East is able to do more for and with our work than we did ourselves. . . . I look forward to seeing how future theological interpreters take these advances and work with them to push theological interpretation in new and promising directions.”
— Stephen E. Fowl, from the foreword

2021 recap: reading

Ten years ago I cracked 150 books in a year; ever since, it’s been around 100 annually, give or take a few in either direction. Heading into 2021 I wanted to up that number—which felt just stuck—as much as I could. I met my minimum goal (I’m currently sitting at 120), along with some of my strategic goals, but I’m hoping to crawl back to 150 in 2022. Some of the successful strategies this past year that I hope to continue:

• Adding audiobooks to my regimen.

• Cutting out podcasts altogether.

• Reading less online.

• Reducing TV viewing.

• Keeping up an ongoing mix of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic works.

I didn’t crack the audiobook nut until March, nor did I drop podcasts until the fall (when a tsunami of work and illness and family commitments overtook my extra time), plus I was working on finalizing the proofs for not one but two books from May to November. Looking ahead to 2022, at the level of mere numbers, if I were to average 11 books per month during the two academic semesters and 16 books per month during the four summer months, that would come to 152. It’s doable, y’all! I’m going to make it happen. One year from today my reading recap for 2022 will be nothing but a Tim Duncan fist pump GIF.

And now, some of my favorites from the year, with scattered commentary.

*

Rereads

5. George Orwell, Animal Farm

4. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

3. C. S. Lewis’s nonfiction. Some comments here.

2. G. K. Chesterton’s nonfiction. Some quotes and remarks here.

1. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. I read all seven once as an 18- or 19-year old. The re-read (via Audible) was glorious. My favorite used to be Dawn Treader, and I had low memories of Caspian and Horse, few memories of Last Battle, and no memories of Silver Chair. Now my definitive ranking: 1. Silver Chair 2. Last Battle 3. Dawn Treader 4. Magician’s Nephew 5. LWW 6. Horse & His Boy 7. Prince Caspian. In truth none of them are bad, and Horse would be higher if its weird and indefensible religious, racial, and cultural stereotypes weren’t so interwoven in the story. As for Lion, if it weren’t the first or so foundational or so iconic, I’d rank it last. I used to think Caspian was the one bad egg, but now I think it’s no longer bad, just the seventh best. But it’s Puddleglum and Underland for the win.

Poetry

5. W. H. Auden, Early Poems

4. John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems

3. Molly McCully Brown, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded

2. Franz Wright, selected volumes. Every year I re-read Wright’s best collections (Beforelife, Martha’s Vineyard, God’s Silence, Wheeling Motel), and every year he remains my favorite.

1. R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems. This year, though, I re-read Thomas’s best volumes (running from Laboratories of the Spirit up to Mass for Hard Times) for the first time in a decade, and he overawed me once again. The master.

Graphic novels

3. Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints. Recommended. Go in not knowing anything, and read both back to back.

2. Art Spiegelman, Maus. A classic for a reason.

1. Craig Thompson, Blankets. This one walloped me.

Fiction

8. Patrick Hoffman, Every Man a Menace. Taut, brutal, surprising, and to the point. In other words, the best sort of crime fiction.

7. P. D. James, Death of an Expert Witness. You know I had to include the Queen.

6. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

5. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Orwell and Huxley are the standard scribblers of the dystopian future; what if Chesterton (Notting Hill) and Lewis (That Hideous Strength) were added to that duo? At least one result: the realization that wit and style, not to mention religious vision, don’t have to be excised from the genre.

4. Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon

3. Charles Portis, True Grit. As promised, this one’s perfect.

2. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

1. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi. Charming and enrapturing from the first sentence to the last. I wrote about it here.

Nonfiction (popular)

11. James Clear, Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results & Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

10. Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth

9. Jesse Singal, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. I wrote about it here.

8. Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

7. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

6. Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. If you love style guides, as I do, this one might move to the top of your list, as it did mine.

5. Abigail Tucker, Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct & Ross Douthat, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. These belong together, both because their authors are married and because they tell parallel stories: about science, about knowledge, about family, about marriage and parenthood and children and illness. I wrote about Douthat here and included a nugget from Tucker here.

4. Andrew Sullivan, Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989–2021. A whirlwind tour of one of the most socially and politically influential public intellectuals and writers of my lifetime. A sort of chronological testament to that influence; you see the nation changing as time goes by in these essays.

3. Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

2. E. H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World. Delightful. I wrote about it here.

1. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. A book that could change your life. As I read it in early 2021, I wondered why Kingsnorth wasn’t a Christian, or at least why he didn’t take serious Christian thinking and writing as a worthy interlocutor. Then he converted.

Nonfiction (scholarly)

5. Audrey Watters, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning. Watters is the very best; my review of her book is forthcoming in Comment.

4. Jason Blakely, We Built Reality: How Social Sciences Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. My review here.

3. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left; Culture Counts; How to Be a Conservative. This year I read some of Scruton’s classics. I wrote about how they struck me as surprisingly but essentially secular here.

2. Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right. Required reading for the present moment. Get on it.

1. Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. I’d never read a full-bore history of the Civil War. My mistake. This is the one. Magnificent.

Christian (popular)

5. Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age

4. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ

3. Peter Leithart, Baptism: A Guide to Life from Death

2b. Eve Tushnet, Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love. I can’t count how many times this book brought me to tears. Why? Because Tushnet has the preternatural ability to force her readers to come to terms with just how much Jesus loves them. She is a treasure.

2a. Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. Christianity Today was right to crown it the book of the year. My review here.

1. Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. First published in the late 1960s, a book that cannot be categorized by genre or style, a true N of 1. Buy it, read it, love it.

Theology (on the recent side)

5. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation

4. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation

3. Timothy P. Jackson, Mordecai Did Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism. My review here.

2. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk. My review here.

1. Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar & Regret: A Theology. Now that Jenson has passed, there is no living theologian I take greater pleasure in reading or learning from—or being provoked by—than Griffiths. He never fails to make you think, or to re-think what you thought you thought before.

Theology (less recent)

5. François Mauriac, What I Believe

4. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom

3. Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture. All Christian undergraduates should read this book, certainly those who already know they are interested in the life of the mind.

2. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? I sometimes wish this little book had a different title, because it obscures both its subject matter and its relevance. Tolle lege.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology. A model of succinct, stylish, substantive, scripturally normed, academically informed, and theologically rich writing. I want every book I write to be patterned on this minor classic.

Blakely, Singal, and “stories”

I have a new piece in the latest issue of The New Atlantis called “Statistics as Storytelling.” The print journal is in subscribers’ hands; the issue will be online sometime this week, I imagine. (It’s jam-packed full of goodness, by the way: Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, Phil Christman, Ari Schulman, Caitrin Keiper, Addison Del Mastro, and many others.) My piece is a long essay review of Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. I’ll link to it in a separate post once it’s up.

You might think of the book as forming a kind of pincer movement with Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. Whereas Blakeley’s book is an academic work building on a particular philosophical tradition (Gadamer, Taylor, MacIntyre, et al), Singal’s is a trade book meant for a wide readership. Each chapter is a systematic take-down of the latest fad in “Primeworld,” or the TED Talk–ification of the social sciences, especially psychology.

I mention Singal’s book in the review, but I don’t engage it much more than a sentence or two. I have to say, I wasn’t prepared for just how good The Quick Fix is. Which is a way of saying that I thought the book would partake, at least a wee bit, of the very phenomenon it is criticizing. But it doesn’t. Its depth and breadth of research is impressive. The detail is painstaking. The dismantling is patient, fair, and deserved in every case. Moreover, Singal’s leftist credentials strengthen the book’s persuasive power, simultaneously preventing dismissals of his arguments (“oh, this is just a reactionary/anti-academic screed that doesn’t support progressive values”) and bolstering his counter-proposals (as in, e.g., when he suggests that attending to systems, policies, and institutions will improve the actual lives of people of color, as opposed to pained introspection by well-meaning white liberals).

But there’s one point of discrepancy between Singal and Blakely, and I’m not sure whether it is merely rhetorical or rises to the level of a substantive disagreement. As the title of my review suggests, Blakely interprets social science as a way of making sense of the world through narrative interpretation. But he doesn’t think this is the problem; the problem is that public and popularizing practitioners of social science do not believe this is what they are doing; indeed their cache comes in the dubious supposition that it is precisely not what they are doing, since their art (excuse me, science) is empirical, not humanistic. His argument, then, is not that we need to do away with the social sciences. It’s that they need to be integrated into a larger humanistic approach to the great and never-ending cultural task of interpreting reality through stories. Stories are how human beings make meaning out of the flux of life; they are unavoidable and in fact crucial to even the hardest of hard scientific ways of understanding the world. “Facts” mean nothing apart from context, and for human being that context is ineluctably narrative in shape. What that means is that we need to be aware of what we are doing and, furthermore, we need to develop nuanced and sophisticated ways of depicting reality in complex stories that, for all their subjective character, are nonetheless true.

Compare that account with the following, which comes from pages 277–279 in the Conclusion (titled “Escape from Primeworld”) to The Quick Fix:

As we've seen, there are myriad reasons half-baked behavioral science catches on, and those reasons often have to do with the cultural or institutional context of a given idea—the problem it is attempting to solve, the societal currents it is riding, and so on. As we conclude this book, it's worth taking stock of the more general, less context-specific reasons why bad social science spreads and what the consequences might be, particularly when it comes to Primeworld accounts.

The simplest reasons half-baked ideas tend to prevail is that all else being equal, the human brain has an easier time latching onto simple and monocausal accounts than to complicated and multicausal ones. Such accounts are more likely to be accepted as true and to spread. Our brains are built to be drawn to quick, elegant-seeming answers.

The legendary sociologist Charles Tilly nicely explains this in his account of human storytelling, Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons . . . and Why. He writes, “Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic, or exemplary events. Relying on widely available knowledge rather than technical expertise, they help make the world intelligible.” Tilly calls storytelling “one of [the] great social interventions” of the human species, precisely because of its ability to simplify and boil down. But this is the same reason stories can lead us astray. “In our complex world, causes and effects always join in complicated ways,” he writes. “Simultaneous causation, incremental effects, environmental effects, mistakes, unintended consequences, and feedback make physical, biological, and social processes the devil's own work-or the Lord’s—to explain in detail. Stories exclude these inconvenient complications.”

Think of all the stories that have fueled half-baked psychology: “Soldiers can resist PTSD if their resilience is boosted”; “Women can close the workplace gender gap if they feel an enhanced sense of power”; “Poor kids can catch up to their richer peers if they develop more grit.” In emphasizing one particular causal claim about deeply complicated systems and outcomes, these and the other blockbuster hits of contemporary psychology elide tremendous amounts of important detail.

It's likely that just as our brains prefer simple stories, within psychology, too, the professional incentives point toward the development of simpler rather than more complex theories. People who study human nature aren't immune to the siren call of simplicity. In a reply to one of her papers, the psychologist Nina Strohminger criticizes this tendency rather eloquently: “The fetishization of parsimony means that unwieldy theories are often dismissed on these grounds alone. . . No doubt there is something less satisfying about settling for inelegance, but the best theories won't always feel right. Elegance is not a suitable heuristic for veracity.” Scientists often have good reason to prefer parsimony—Occam's razor has its uses—but still: simple-seeming explanations of complex phenomena warrant skepticism.

Of course, simple and elegant and appealing theories are more likely to pay. If you're a psychologist in the twenty-first century, particularly a young one, you face a daunting landscape when it comes to making a name and therefore a career for yourself. Funding is being cut left and right, and the ongoing adjunctification of academia certainly hasn't spared psychology. There's one silver lining, though: the public is more interested in behavioral science than ever before. That's especially true if you can tell a simple, exciting, and above all new story about a subject of great societal concern.

I regret that Singal—and Tilly—use the trope of stories and storytelling for the in itself accurate point they want to make. What they have in view is simplistic or reductive theories of complex phenomena that, because the human mind craves parsimony and the masses love a straightforward tale, gain popularity both in the academy and in intellectual journalism by comparison to the unsexy, the muddled, the multi-factored, the epistemically incomplete explanation. But that has nothing to do with the human propensity for narrative. Tilly’s account is itself a story, perhaps overly reductive: Humans tell stories to cut through the clutter, and this disposition to storytelling explains why fad psychology has such a grip on our collective imagination as a society. But my observing this isn’t a criticism. Every legible sentence and assertion in an argument is unavoidably a kind of compressed story and necessarily, always and everywhere, simplified relative to an exhaustive explanation of the subject in question. Which is just another way of saying it’s human beings doing the thinking and talking. That isn’t an obstacle in the way of our knowledge. It’s how we know anything at all.

In my view, then, Singal’s closing nod to the dangers of “storytelling” is not in material disagreement with Blakeley’s proposal. If the two books form a pincer movement, I would describe their relationship in this way: Blakely’s provides the necessary philosophical framework for a workable theory and practice of science—which is what Singal wants, a reliable habitus of public-facing social sciences like psychology—while Singal’s book shows, in glorious gory detail (through well-told vignettes, by the way!), what Blakely lacks the space to unfold in full: the manifold dysfunctions of scientism in its current dominant ideological form.

Take up and read them both. They make for quite the one-two punch.

Axioms of Christian exegesis

I … rejoice, as any interpreter of scripture should, to find such a clear case of prima facie contradiction [in the text]; such instances are efficacious in prompting theological thought because of the axiom that the canon of scripture is not incoherent. …

But what about the pleonasm [in the biblical passage under consideration]? It’s axiomatic for Christians that the text of scripture has no accidental features, which entails that the pleonasm isn’t one.

—Paul J. Griffiths, Regret: A Theology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 4, 20

The adventure of history

This week I’ve been listening to Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World on Audible. I’ve had it on my shelf for a while but I decided it might be good in audio form. I was right: it is wonderful. I’m a little over halfway through, and it’s been sheer pleasure. Since the original German edition of the book is nearly a century old, it’s been translated into dozens of langues, and the English version came out to wide acclaim almost 20 years ago, I take for granted that I have nothing new to say about the glories of this happy wee volume. But listening this week did bring one thought to mind that’s possibly worth sharing: Gombrich has something to teach us about what it means to tell history as a cultural and pedagogical practice.

God help me from wading into the treacherous waters of recent debates over how we do history, in general and in the classroom. But, if I am going to get wet, let me at least avoid wading and just dip a toe or two in from above.

Here’s Gombrich’s lesson, in all its simplicity: For all its many faults and crimes, errors and sufferings, human history is an adventure. And if you don’t tell it as an adventure, you’re doing it wrong. Why? For two reasons.

First, because unadventurous history is boring—one damn thing after another—and no one, not adults and certainly not children, wants to hear about ancient people in faraway lands doing one damn thing after another. Besides, history isn’t boring, so to make it boring is the hard thing, the perpetual own goal of perhaps the most fascinating subject in the world. In this case, the straight route is the best: make the telling as absorbing as the thing itself.

Second, history should be told as an adventure because nearly everyone and everything (and every time and every place) in history is, by comparison to those who are learning or studying history and their immediate surrounding contexts, different—foreign, alien, strange, exotic: all the words you’re supposed to avoid. And what Gombrich succeeds at most, besides making history both accessible and exciting, is rendering the difference of his subjects to such a degree that, no matter what he is talking about, it sounds attractive, appealing, unimaginably magnificent.

Already by the book’s midpoint, for example, Gombrich has discussed China, India, Greece, Rome, Persia, Israel, and the Arabs, as well as Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, and Muhammad. Guess what? Every single one of them shines like the sun. Gombrich constantly poses rhetorical questions to the reader, ostensibly a child of 10 or 12 years, questions like “Isn’t that wonderful?” or “Don’t you think that’s marvelous?” or “What must it have been like to be there?” or “Beautiful, don’t you agree?” We hear of a sage’s austere simplicity or a general’s peerless courage or a prophet’s irresistible charisma or a governor’s prudent planning, and we nod along with sympathetic understanding. Even when he is recounting what might appear to modern ears as immoral, cruel, or bizarre, Gombrich maintains a light touch, asking the reader, whether explicitly or implicitly, Why might he have done that? Why might others have celebrated it? Can you imagine living at such a time? What unintended benefits redound to us? There isn’t a high horse in sight. Gombrich knows that history is human, and he never lets you forget that the cultures and peoples and individuals and actions recounted in history are wholly of a piece with you and me, today, because we here and now, like they then and there, are human through and through. That means deception and violence and pain, even as it means glory and love and virtue, too. Above all, in the wide sweep of historical perspective, it means realizing the incalculable debt we owe to our forebears, none of whom we can thank, but a few of whom we can come to know, if belatedly. Mathematics from Arab scholars, architecture from Roman builders, theater from Greek dramatists, justice from Jewish prophets, compassion from Christian preachers, manuscripts from cloistered monks: the gifts keep on stacking up, one on top of another. A child, upon closing this book, apart from wanting to learn more more more about all this fascinating material, will feel in her heart nothing so much as bottomless gratitude, rooted in an unquestionable conviction that the ancients are simultaneously entirely different from her and yet the very same.

That is how history should be taught, or it seems to me. Critique follows understanding; deconstruction follows the building of sturdy foundations. In a word, everything turns on affection. Speaking for myself, as I listen to each chapter coming to a close, it is affection more than anything that wells up in me—at times to the point of tears.