A goal I have for 2024 is to make it a year of more purposeful reading. My strategy for achieving this may bring to mind the oft-used time management metaphor of filling one’s jar with the big rocks first, followed by the pebbles and the sand—which, by the way, reminds me of Oliver Burke’s contrarian comment that there is, in fact, not enough room in our lives for all the big rocks, so we need to say “No” outright to some of them. The strategy is to have some big books to read right through (about 15 to 20), along with a number of titles I’ve been eyeing plus books that have carried over from last year (say, 50)—some of which will doubtless fall by the wayside, but no matter—and then to leave space for others that catch my interest or necessitate my attention during the year.
At this point, the big books I have in mind are Iain McGilchrist’s massive two-volume The Matter With Things (2021); Eric Johnson’s Foundations for Soul Care (2014) and God and Soul Care (2017); some volumes of Petrus van Mastricht’s Theoretical-Practical Theology (1698, trans. 2018–); Augustine’s magisterial City of God (AD 426, trans. 1998); historian Peter Brown’s intellectual memoir Journeys of the Mind (2023); and Richard Muller’s four-volume Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (2003), using this handy reading plan. I’m sure I will take on more as the year progresses. These are books that require determination.
With those “rocks” in place, I plan to read a good number of monographs in historical theology (the study of theology’s history and development)—including Jaroslav Pelikan, Michel Barnes, Stephen Hampton, more Muller—as well as making a foray into historiography (the study of the writing of history), reading the likes of Quentin Skinner, Ernst Breisach, and Marc Bloch.
I also plan to read a variety of books concerning pastoral ministry as I look forward to being ordained and serving in a church by the end of the year: books on mental illness, depression, and counseling; Protestant apologetics; the canon of Scripture; biblical exegesis and, in particular, figural reading; and church leadership. On that last topic, I recently read Harry Reeder’s From Embers to a Flame (2004), a basic but good treatment of church revitalisation, and Tyler Arnold’s Pastoral Visitation: For the Care of Souls (2023), part of the Lexham Ministry Guides, many of which I intend to read this year.
If those are the “pebbles,” then the “sand” would be Patricia Highsmith, Robert Gottlieb, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2012), and so on.
Of other books I’ve finished this summer, I want to mention Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World (2023), a “how we got here” kind of book highlighting major developments from the year 1776 which contributed to the shaping of the post-Christian West. This was a blast. Thoroughly fascinating and illuminating. I also enjoyed Matthew Martens’s Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal (2023), a sensible, biblically-informed examination of the American criminal justice system, covering everything from witnesses and plea bargaining to sentencing and the death penalty. I found that it dovetailed well with Elizabeth Bruenig’s essays on America’s death row, On Human Slaughter (2023), which I have been reading on and off.
Though I disagreed on several counts with Brad East’s The Doctrine of Scripture (2021), I came away from it refreshed, challenged, and stimulated. I think East has some valuable insights in this tightly packed book. Two stand out: that the church’s rule for faith and practice is “not Scripture understood in any way” but “Scripture as received and interpreted in accordance with catholic teaching” (e.g., with Nicaea and Constantinople); and that the native habitat of Scripture is public worship (read aloud and received eagerly with reverence as a congregation), while the private, devotional reading of Scripture is a kind of extension of public, liturgical reading. This latter point likely chafes against our “post-Gutenberg, post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment presumptions about the relationship between individual Christians and the Bible.” But the fact is that the majority of believers, past and present, have not had immediate, private access to Scripture. Which is not to discourage private reading, but to say that it should not be set forth as the be-all and end-all of Christian piety. What is truly indispensable is the corporate liturgy of the church, in which Scripture finds its true home.