Finished reading: Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz-Weber

This one was kinda hidden in those photos I posted yesterday. But after wading through Heim I was ready for a shorter, easy read, and Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People by Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber was just the ticket.

It’s more of Nadia at her best, telling stories about her little parish in Denver and how she has experienced God at work in her life.

Nadia is a polarizing figure. Sure, you may have concerns about her attitude, language, and bits of her theology. Regardless, every time I hear or read her, I come away wishing that my faith, embrace of the Gospel, and walk with Jesus looked a little more like hers. That’s enough for me.

Finished reading: Saved From Sacrifice by S. Mark Heim

I don’t remember when this book came onto my radar, but it was already on my Amazon wishlist when my friend Daniel’s recommendation pushed it to the top of that list.

Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross by S. Mark Heim is a long-ish volume that rather thoroughly summarizes the arguments for the ‘scapegoat’ theory of the atonement as proposed by René Girard. My knowledge of atonement theories has been relatively limited up to this point; aside from knowing “penal substitionary atonement” (PSA) (and remembering a Desiring God pastor’s conference where Mark Driscoll declared it one of the fundamental truths of the faith that was a hill to die on), I’ve not dug into any. So Saved by Sacrifice was an eye-opening entry into a differing view of Christ’s death.

As an aside, here’s my summary of the condensed Wikipedia summary of Girard’s position:

it is humankind, not God, who has need for various forms of atoning violence. Humans are driven by desire for that which another has or wants. This desire increases to a point where society is at risk; it is at this point that the scapegoat mechanism is triggered. This is the point where one person is singled out as the cause of the trouble and is expelled or killed by the group. This person is the scapegoat. Social order is restored as people are contented that they have solved the cause of their problems by removing the scapegoated individual, and the cycle begins again. The keyword here is “content”. Scapegoating serves as a psychological relief for a group of people. Girard contends that this is what happened in the narrative of Jesus. The difference between the scapegoating of Jesus and others, Girard believes, is that in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, he is shown to be an innocent victim; humanity is thus made aware of its violent tendencies and the cycle is broken.

I also quoted a paragraph from Heim’s book in a previous blog post that was a key bit of explanation in helping me get my head around the idea.

Heim spends a good chunk at the beginning of the book explaining the theory and how representations of Jesus’ death from the very early church might support this scapegoat perspective. He then overviews how the scapegoat theory fits into readings of other books - including a really interesting perspective on Job - and then ties things up by addressing the key PSA texts (think Romans 3 - 5 and most of Hebrews) and how they might be read from a scapegoating perspective.

I’d definitely recommend this one as worthwhile reading if the topic is of interest. It was thick, but not dense - a very helpful read.

By resurrection Jesus is cleared of the scapegoat charges against him...

By resurrection Jesus is cleared of the scapegoat charges against him. But the resurrection also acquits those who scapegoated him. While they certainly committed the crime and are certainly guilty, it is also incontestable that the one they are charged with killing is alive. They can be declared not guilty of Jesus’ death by the fact that Jesus is not dead. The prosecution cannot proceed in this capital case without a dead body, and the tomb is empty. What the resurrection presents in court is a living person, what [Markus] Barth calls “the evidence of the raised victim.” It is thus righteous of God to account the accused not guilty, or justified by resurrection. Of course, the risen Christ could justly press for retribution against those who had wronged him, even if they did not succeed in silencing him permanently. But this, which is his right, is also his right to decline. And Christ does so, becoming instead an advocate for sinners.

-- S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, Kindle location 1980

I got this book for Christmas and am finally getting the chance to dig into it. This is my first trip into the Girardian scapegoating theory of the atonement, and it’s quite a ride.

Finished reading: The Type B Manager by Victor Lipman

Being a recently new manager at work, and having a definite Type B personality, I saw The Type B Manager on the shelf and thought, hey, why not?

Now, books on management, in general, are a tough sell for me. After a lifetime of reading thick engineering, physics, history, and theology, management books seem relatively thin books and mostly a collection of platitudes and “well, duh” principles. But in an attempt to become a good manager, I keep giving them a try. 

The Type B Manager was an exemplary specimen of this sort of thin platitude. Even in  trying to address Type B personalities, the book tends to describe the management challenge, what a Type A manager would do, and then how a Type B manager might handle it differently - a strategy that made the Type B personality seem like the poorer option. 

Maybe I just need to give up management books in general and spend more time reading Rands instead.

Finished reading: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I didn’t get as much read on this business trip as I’d thought I might - French schedules have you eating dinner late with little time left for recreational reading before bed - but I did manage to finish All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. This novel, set in WWII, tells the parallel stories of a blind French girl and a German boy with a precocious engineering streak.

It’s a beautifully told story, capturing a smaller slice of life than you often get from a World War II novel. The intersections between the two main characters become clear by about half-way through the book, and I spent the rest of the time hoping against hope that the ending would be satisfactory. It was.

All the Light We Cannot See won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and while I haven’t read that much 2014/2015 fiction yet, I can understand why this one took the prize. Highly recommended.

Finished reading: How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson

I picked up David Thomson’s How to Watch a Movie on a whim from my local library shelf knowing nothing about it or Thomson. You can’t really call me a movie buff - I just don’t have time to watch many movies - but I really enjoy watching them when I get the chance, and I love listening to smart people talk about movies. (The Filmspotting podcast has been at the top of my must-listen list for at least the past 5 years.)

So for my interest in movies, I haven’t (to my recollection) read any books about them.

And, (spoiler alert?) if you’re in my shoes, I wouldn’t recommend this one.

Maybe it’s brilliant and I just need to read 10 other books to get ready for it, but I don’t think so. In 200 pages Thomson talks about different aspects of film-making and film-watching and manages to come across as a pompous snob. I pushed on through because it was short and I wasn’t ready to start my “nope” list on Goodreads quite yet.

So, I need to find some better books on film. Which jogs my memory - the Filmspotting guys did an episode recently where they listed their top 5 film books. Guess I should’ve paid more attention. Maybe I’ll give it another listen.

Finished reading: Hackers by Steven Levy

I hadn’t heard of this one prior to listening to an Incomparable podcast episode last year - for the life of me I can’t figure out which one - but it stocked my Amazon wish list with several tech history books, which my mother-in-law then generously gave me for Christmas.

In Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Levy tells the story of software hackers who for the most part aren’t household names. Sure, there are quick mentions of Jobs, Wozniak, and Gates, but there are a dozen others you’ve never heard of who are similarly fascinating.

Levy talks quite a bit about the hacker ethos and principles that were pervasive from the early 1960s until, well, business and money got significantly involved in the late 1970s. It was a fun read for me since I recognize my own potential to become one of these heads-down, computer-obsessed hackers who barely notices when the sun rises or sets. (A course I have thankfully avoided thus far… for which my wife is both thankful and probably largely responsible.)

Yes, I’m shamelessly picking up John Halton’s habit of blogging reading progress this year, if for no other reason than it gives me 60+ additional posts a year… and maybe give a reader a good recommendation for a book to read. (Or to stay away from!)

My 2015 Reading Year in Review

2015 was another enjoyable year of reading for me, and with books tracked as usual on Goodreads, here’s a short summary:

Total books read: 62. That’s less than last year, but more than each of the three years before that. Fairly average for me.

Fiction/non-fiction: 36 / 26.

Fiction:

  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter #6) (Rowling, J.K.) re-read w/ the kids
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter #7) (Rowling, J.K.) re-read w/ the kids
  • Kristin Lavransdatter (Kristin Lavransdatter, #1-3) (Undset, Sigrid) Epic. Long. Mostly worth it.
  • Station Eleven (Mandel, Emily St. John) excellent
  • Spark (Hawks, John Twelve)
  • Empire (The Chronicles of the Invaders, #2) (Connolly, John)
  • Satin Island (McCarthy, Tom)
  • City of Savages (Kelly, Lee)
  • The Great Zoo of China (Reilly, Matthew)
  • Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy, #1) (Follett, Ken)
  • Winter of the World (The Century Trilogy #2) (Follett, Ken)
  • Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3) (Follett, Ken)
  • No Fortunate Son (Pike Logan, #7) (Taylor, Brad)
  • Mightier Than the Sword (The Clifton Chronicles, #5) (Archer, Jeffrey)
  • Seveneves (Stephenson, Neal)
  • The Goblin Emperor (Addison, Katherine) an unanticipated favorite
  • Tin Men (Golden, Christopher)
  • Iron Wolf (Brown, Dale)
  • Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War (Singer, P.W.)
  • The Three-Body Problem (Three-Body, #1) (Cixin, Liu)
  • The Dark Forest (Three-Body, #2) (Cixin, Liu) dense but really enjoyable sci-fi
  • The Martian (Weir, Andy) fine but don’t buy all the hype
  • The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1) (Rothfuss, Patrick)
  • Invasion of Privacy (Reich, Christopher)
  • The Water Knife (Bacigalupi, Paolo)
  • The Library at Mount Char (Hawkins, Scott)
  • The Governor’s Wife: A novel (Harvey, Michael)
  • My Struggle: Book 1 (Knausgård, Karl Ove) strangely fascinating
  • Without Remorse (John Clark, #1) (Clancy, Tom) re-read for the first time in 20 years
  • Neverwhere (Gaiman, Neil)
  • Zero World (Hough, Jason M.)
  • Tenacity: A Thriller (Law, J.S.)
  • Dark Corners (Rendell, Ruth)
  • Werewolf Cop (Klavan, Andrew)
  • Saturn Run (Sandford, John)

Non-Fiction:

  • The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Fukuyama, Francis)

  • Alan Turing: The Enigma (Hodges, Andrew)

  • Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Armstrong, Karen)

  • Words Without Music: A Memoir (Glass, Philip)

  • The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Lewis, Michael)

  • 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Mann, Charles C.)

  • Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics (Halpern, Paul)

  • Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Weiner, Tim)

  • Between the World and Me (Coates, Ta-Nehisi) deserves every accolade it gets

  • The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (Bryson, Bill)

  • Leaders Ought to Know: 11 Ground Rules for Common Sense Leadership (Hooser, Phillip Van)

  • Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (Haygood, Will)

  • The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Zaleski, Philip) a good warts-and-all history of the Inklings.

  • The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities (Breyer, Stephen G.)

  • Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers (Winchester, Simon)

  • The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (Swaim, Barton)

  • Alexander Hamilton (Chernow, Ron) Because Hamilton, obviously.

  • Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Volf, Miroslav)

  • Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Palmer, Parker J.)

  • The Lion’s World: A journey into the heart of Narnia (Williams, Rowan)

  • Secondhand Jesus: Trading Rumors of God for a Firsthand Faith (Packiam, Glenn)

  • Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Smith, James K.A.)

  • Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (Rohr, Richard)

  • Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Rohr, Richard)

  • The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective (Rohr, Richard)

  • Malestrom: Manhood Swept into the Currents of a Changing World (James, Carolyn Custis)

  • Spiritual Friendship (Hill, Wesley) Worth reading, and then reading again.

Worked on, but didn’t finish yet:

  • Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Wright, N.T.) I’m about half-way through volume one. Slow going.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Won the “buy it for Dad for Christmas” award: Desiring the Kingdom by James K.A. Smith.
  • I’m honestly surprised by how little theology I read this year. Seems like a lot less than previous years. Guess maybe I was ready for a break.
  • Size of my unread book pile at the moment: embarrassingly large. Got 4 new books for Christmas. Added them to the pile. It’s possible that by spring I’ll need to go on another “no books from the library until the pile goes down” pledge. We’ll see.

Do you have any recommendations for 2016 reading?

Finished reading: Saturn Run

So here’s an idea: a sci-fi novel written by somebody who can actually write, with the physics and science worked out by a real nerd sidekick. That’s what you get from [Saturn Run](Saturn Run www.amazon.com/dp/039917…) by novelist John Sanford with help from sci-if nerd Ctein.  Saturn Run is the book The Martian wishes it could be if Andy Weir had a talent for prose. Great way to wind up my year of reading.

Formation of the Heart

I’m working my way through Jamie Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, and he is driving home the point that it’s not just our minds that need formed, but our hearts. He argues that humans are not, at a base level, thinkers, but lovers. As such, Christians need to be concerned not just with education, but with formation of our practices and desires. I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts later, but this quote stuck out today:

Unfortunately, the church often adopts a … misguided strategy: while the mall, Victoria’s Secret, and Jerry Bruckheimer are grabbing hold of our gut (kardia) by means of our body and its senses - in stories and images, sights and sound, and commercial versions of “smells and bells” - the church’s response is oddly rationalist.

It plunks us down in a “worship” service, the culmination of which is a forty-five-minute didactic sermon, a sort of holy lecture, trying to convince us of the dangers by implanting doctrines and beliefs in our minds.

While the mall paradoxically appreciates that we are liturgical, desiring animals, the (Protestant) church still tends to see us as Cartesian minds. While secular liturgies are after our hearts through our bodies, the church thinks it only has to get into our heads. While Victoria’s Secret is fanning a flame in our kardia, the church is trucking water to our minds. While secular liturgies are enticing us with affective images of a good life, the church is trying to convince us otherwise by depositing ideas.

Hmmmmm…