Notes on a Year in Reading and Writing

Rounding Up the Year

It’s the end of the year, and per the usual, there were many, many words written and read. 2022 will be a banger of a year for me writing-wise, with two books coming out, as well as some other major pieces on the way for popular and scholarly publications.

I’ll highlight the writing as it jumps out into the world, but first up will be the Feburary release of a project that I’ve already got in my hands: A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence (Baker Academic), co-authored with David Cramer. It took us four years to pull together, due to writing fits and starts and multiple job changes, but it’s done and it’s glorious. Order yours in the link above, and listen to a podcast where we talk about it here. We did a long interview for Sojourners, as well as Walk and Way, a Baptist podcast, which I’ll tag here as these come available.

But the grist for writing is reading, reading, reading. Thinking and writing are never done purely from the resources of my own head, but actual and imagined conversations with others. So, in lieu of a more organized wrap-up, some of the things I read this year that you should as well:

My reading tends to fall into one of four buckets: 1) reading for particular projects (whether writing or teaching), 2) old books within the discipline, 3) new books within the discipline, and 4) “free range” books (those read for purely for interest). Since I teach graduate students in the Abilene Christian University Graduate School of Theology for a living, I’m afforded a good deal of time for these kinds of pursuits, as it’s literally my job to help form students intellectually and spiritually. My own scholarly. predilections for work at the intersection of theology and ethics lends to a lot of profligate reading along the way.

Reading I Did For Projects, That I Wouldn’t Have Found Otherwise, But am Glad I Did:

Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts

I spent part of the summer and Fall writing a paper on Dante’s engagements with Franciscan arguments around poverty, and couldn’t recommend this treatment any more strongly. It’s a brilliant reading of the moral world of Dante’s writings, and makes the case as clearly as you could make it why his moral theology needs to be taken seriously on its own merits, and not as some kind of subsidiary of Thomas Aquinas.

Dante, De Monarchia

Dante’s more widely known for his literary accomplishments, but his political treatise is worth taking up again. The basic thesis here is that the church went wrong materially when it took up private property, a managerial vocation, and financial stability. Dante’s vision of material goods is a fairly radical one when it comes to the church embracing a life of poverty and recognition of the place of church within an overarching sense of social order. It’s bonkers and wildly wrong at some points, but worth your taking up.

Old and New Books within the Discipline

Agnes Callard, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming

Theories of virtue within Christian ethics have been in dire need of this kind of philosophical intervention for decades. One of the basic problems within the development of virtue is the question of what that actually looks like, and how we move from learning about virtue to adopting habits. Callard’s theory of aspiration helps bridge this gap: we move forward by adopting a life which we aspire to but cannot fully know what it will entail to be different. Accordingly, the form of virtue is always different than we thought it would be, and that’s a good thing.

Augustine, Sermons on the Psalms

For several months, my morning devotional reading was helped by reading Augustine’s sermons on the Psalms. At one level, they’re interesting for historical and theological readings: you can see fragments of his other works developing as he works these things out for weekly preaching. But there’s a true joy in reading someone else’s meditation on Scripture. We have thousands of patristic-era sermons, and while Augustine wasn’t the best homiletician of the era, they’re accessible, meaty, and a grateful reprieve from most terrible modern preaching.

Profligate Reading

Matthew B. Crawford, World Beyond Your Head

Drawing together reflections on tech, social formation, epistemology, and behaviorism, Crawford offers his analysis of not only how we learn to think well, but what it means to think well within the contours of a late modern world in which thinking is scarce. It’s one well worth re-reading.

Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity

To say that this blew my mind would be an understatement. Rosa’s account of modernity is not one which trades on the decline of authority, secularization, or the rise of the affective self, but on acceleration: the world’s acceleration leads to increased cycles of social and material obsolescence, anxiety of people about their place in the world, the loss of traditions, and much more. It’s a truly breathtaking work, and one which I hope to do more with in the future.

The Paddington Bear Series

If you can find the audio books with Stephen Fry, these are some of the most delightful things I can recommend. The Paddington books are pure whimsy, set in a world where a talking bear wearing a hat is simply no big deal.

Here’s to more good reading, writing, and thinking in 2022. Thanks for coming along.