Tomorrow is My Birthday: Please Clap

On What I'm Writing (Just Not Here), and An Invitation to the Next Book Club

Tomorrow is my birthday, and it’s also the end of a brief sale on supporting subscriptions, in celebration of the new name and focus here. These two things are not related.

A Few Brief Writing Notes

I’ll be traveling for work for a few days to attend the Baptist General Convention of Texas annual meeting. The BGCT represents somewhere north of 5,000 churches, and the annual meeting is where representatives of these congregations meet, vote, and learn about different issues. As with most conferences, I’ll be spending my time not in workshops but meeting with folks. So—if you’re in the Waco area, and have my info, reach out!

Accordingly, writing has slowed, as there are classes to teach, courses for next semester to prep, and other writing obligations tapping me on the shoulder. In no particular order, some things I’m working on that I’ll be highlighting soon:

1. A review of the forthcoming Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. I’ll let you read my own assessment when it comes out, but the film is a doozy, and it was a hard review to write. That being said, this review may be one of the things I’ve enjoyed writing the most for Christianity Today, and I’m proud of them for running it.

2. An Advent reflection on the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, also for Christianity Today. It’s not a “the flight of the Holy Family = taking in all refugees” kind of argument, but a meditation on what it means that the people who were once held in slavery in Egypt now are sheltered by it.

3. A double review of two recent books on Augustine and slavery, both written by friends, for Mere Orthodoxy. Both are intriguing and provocative, particularly since Augustine stands at the heart of so much Christian theology. I have questions.

4. Beginning to prep for two lectures (much later this Spring) for the Arbour Memorial Lectures at Weatherford College: “War in A Bureaucratic Age”, and “Peace in a Bureaucratic Age”. I’ll have more to say about these as they develop, but the basic thesis is that the theological moorings of how to think about war and the attention to the person are lost together. The result is war (and peacemaking!) today primarily attends to the greater good, and loses the suffering of particular persons in the process. There will be much bravado.

AND. Pre-orders for my next book are apparently being taken, which means I’ll be doing a lot of additional edits and work on this between now and next summer.

#2 and #3 on this list are tapping very patiently on my shoulder. Thus, the writing here will be a bit slower for the next few days. But you, patient readers, will be the beneficiaries of this, since it’s here that I do a lot of my rough-draft thinking.

The Next Book Club

The next book club will be, by popular demand, Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Since it’s publication in 1981, it has sparked nothing less than a revival of writing about the importance of virtue and the moral life. It’s a subtle book, so we’re going to go slowly, taking three months to work through it. We’ll be working from the 2nd edition, which is easier to find.

This slow-read will be for supporting subscribers. Below, you’ll find the dates for the three times we’ll work through it, as well as some helpful introductory material to get you oriented: