April through December 2022 Reading Reflections
With apologies for being delinquent in reporting on them, I finished 11 books in the last three quarters of the year.
Beyond Baseball’s Color Barrier: The Story of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Past, Present, and Future by Rocco Constantino (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)
Far Side of the Moon by Liisa Jorgensen (Chicago Review Press, 2022)
This is the story of Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to the moon. Available on the book’s website.
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (OneWorld, 2014)
This book had been on my “to read” list for some time. Grateful to my former boss for gifting me a copy. Available on the book’s website.
Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove (University of North Carolina, 2017)
Really interesting to read this history of Washington, DC, just a year after moving to the area. It’s a long, academic read, but well worth it for anyone who lives in this area. Available from various retailers through the publisher’s website.
Leave This World Behind by Rumaan Alam (Ecco, 2020)
Regrettably the only fiction work I finished in 2022 — but a good one! I won’t spoil the plot, but let’s just say it was timely to read after experiencing a pandemic (but it’s not strictly about a pandemic). Available from various retailers via the author’s website.
The End of Bias: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias by Jessica Nordell (Metropolitan Books, 2021)
Available from various retailers via the author’s website.
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright (HarperOne, 2008)
Another book that had been on my “to read” list for some time. A compelling treatise on the Resurrection. Grateful to a new friend I made this year who was cleaning out his own library and gifted it to me. Available on Amazon.
Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons by Jeremy Denk (Random House, 2022)
As a former music major, even as one who didn’t go as far as Denk, this was very fun to read! Available at various retailers via the author’s website.
Faithful Anti-Racism by Christina Barland Edmondson and Chad Brennan (Intervarsity Press, 2022)
An excerpt:
When we recognize that we are receiving advantages at other people’s expense, it is essential to do our part to correct that injustice. But, even if we’re working toward building a more just and loving society, there remains a psychological and spiritual burden that comes with receiving benefits unjustly. In my life, I find the burden can prompt denial (“It doesn’t affect me.”), anger (“I never asked for this!”), and guilt (“Why haven’t I done more to fix it?”). I’m seeking to follow the more productive paths of acknowledging my privilege and the pain it produces in me and others, forgiving the perpetrators of injustice (including myself), and focusing on the freedom and forgiveness we have through Christ.
Available at various retailers via the book’s website.
How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now by James K.A. Smith (Brazos, 2022)
I’ve read several of Smith’s previous works and was excited to read this one. An excerpt:
On the micro level of the individual, the spiritual confusion of nowhen Christianity manifests as what we might call “blank-slate-ism.” Certain myths of conversion feed into this, as if conversion were like the reset of the character in a video game, erasing what has gone before. These forms of ahistorical, atemporal, nowhen Christianity – often hybrid legacies of revivalism and modernism – imagine the “Christian life” as such an utter displacement of the life that I have lived that we are puzzled by the perdurance of habit (which is why it too often morphs into judgmental legalism). Sadly, this often amounts to a spiritualized version of “get over it.” The particularities and contingencies of our personal histories are effaced by a version of grace that, rather than saving us, simply obliterates this “I” that has a past.
Of course, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). Baptism is a burial, and we rise to newness of life (Rom. 6:4). But the new creation is a resurrection, not a reset: we know because of the scars. Just as the resurrected Christ bears the mark of his wounds – his “history” with the Roman Empire – so the new self in Christ is the resurrection of a self with a past. The “I” is saved only if this me with this bodily history rises to new life. If all that I’ve lived through was simply erased by grace, then “I” am lost rather than redeemed. If all that I’ve become and learned and acquired and experienced was just overwhelmed and made null by grace, then salvation would be an obliteration rather than a redemption. The God who saves is the God who calls and commissions us to a ministry of reconciliation; and in that call and commission, God wants to unleash the unique constellations and talents and experiences to make me who I’ve become. When the distinct amalgam of my history – including its traumas and wounds – intersects with the renewing power of the Spirit, a chemical reaction of possibility awaits. That possibility is a calling: the “good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:10). Each of us is a singular poiema, Paul tells us: a unique, original, one-off work of art precisely because only this “I” with this history could be the self God can use in this way. Because of my past, God’s renewing Spirit can birth in me insights, empathy, attention that are exactly what someone needs in the world.
Grace is not a time machine. Grace is not a reset button. Grace is something even more unbelievable: it is restoration. It is reconciliation of, and despite, our histories of animosity. Grace isn’t an undoing, it’s an overcoming.
Another excerpt:
Artists help us best appreciate this fragile dynamism of creaturehood. This is no doubt true because art specializes in ambiguity and nuance. What is art but the practiced discipline of evoking but not pinning down? A film, a poem, a song can invite us into multiple states of mind, evoking conflicting emotions yet managing to hold them together so that we dwell in the world with an unspoken appreciation for its messiness and a newfound humility in the face of its complexity. Our mortality is fraught and the arts are a balm, not because they heal us of our mortality but because they absolve us of the need to control, to fix, to escape.
And another:
A futural, eschatological posture runs counter to any backward-looking nostalgia that romanticizes the retro, especially in its religious forms. While history is the arena for God’s redemptive action, and while God’s covenantal faithfulness across time is what fuels our hope (hence the prophets’ constant appeal to the exodus), faithfulness is never synonymous with a recovery project. We are never called to turn back the clock. Appeals to God’s actions in history are not invoked in a spirit of “golden-age-ism”; Eden is never celebrated as our destination. We are pulled toward a home we’ve never visited. We are oriented to what is coming, not what has been. (150)
And one more:
The philosopher Edmund Husserl, a generative thinker about the nature of time consciousness, liked to speak of the “now” as a melodious chord rather than a jumble of sound. When a melody sounds, Husserl observes, “the individual notes do not completely disappear when the stimulus or the action of the nerve excited by them comes to an end. When the new note sounds, the one just preceding it does not disappear without a trace.” if that were the case, “then instead of a melody we should have a jumble of sounds.” In order for the chord to resonate, there has to be a mysterious way in which we hold a past, present, and future in us. To hear such a harmony is a feat of ear and mind that holds together a “now” that is pregnant with both memory and anticipation – like a gymnast poised on a beam. A now is “always essentially an edge-point in an interval of time.”
Available at various retailers via the author’s website.
Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America by Cody Keenan (Mariner Books, 2022)
I love a good political memoir, especially one covering a period of very recent history. Keenan was director of speechwriting in the Obama Administration and the book, with flashbacks to other parts of Keenan’s White House years along the way, covers ten days in June 2015. Available at various retailers via the author’s website.
