I’m slowly whittling down my bedside book pile, completing Darren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism last week. This was a fantastic book. Dochuk traces the history of evangelicalism from the early days of the Depression, as evangelicals migrated west from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and the like, to California. As a child of evangelicalism in the 80s and 90s, it was very enlightening to read about J. Vernon McGee, Billy Graham, E. V. Hill, Bill Bright, Tim LaHaye, and others. It was a bit slow going through the 1920s and 30s, but from the 1940s onward it was a wonderful, interesting read. I owe Brian Auten bigtime for recommending it.

I’m now a few chapters in to a biography of Thomas Merton which I’m not real excited about yet, but I’ll give it some time.

The book pile:

• Surprised by Scripture, NT Wright
• Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong
• Meditative Prayer, Thomas Merton
• Resurrection and Moral Order, Oliver O’Donavan
• Paul and the Faithfulness of God, NT Wright
• A Severe Mercy, Shelden Vanauken
• From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, Darren Dochuk
• Parables of Judgment, Robert Capon
• Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris
• Evangelical Theology, Karl Barth
• Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton
• The Wounded Healer, Henri J. M. Nouwen
• The Monster in the Hollows, Andrew Peterson

Books I’ve started but not yet finished:

• The Kingdom of Christ, Russell Moore
• Jesus Manifesto, Frank Viola & Leonard Sweet
• The Fiddler’s Green, A. S. Peterson

Books I wanna re-read:

• The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark
• When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson
• Between Noon and Three, Robert Capon

Unread on my Kindle:

• Barefoot Church: Serving the Least in a Consumer Culture, Brandon Hatmaker
• Center Church, Tim Keller
• The Pastor: A Memoir, Eugene Peterson
• Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity, Frank Viola
• Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, Robert Edsel
• Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality, Richard Beck
• Why Holiness Matters: We’ve Lost Our Way–But We Can Find it Again, Tyler Braun