Posts in: Books

Finished Reading: Balkan Contextual Theology by Stipe Odak 📚

Tremendous. Refreshingly complex and open-ended. As one author puts it:

Autochthonous forms of theological thinking inspired by concrete lived experiences in the Balkans are mostly missing or are on the margins of the mainstream theological corpus.

I have been fascinated by writers from the Balkans from the moment I picked up Udovički’s Burn This House in a bookstore in Lancaster, PA in the summer of 2013. There is much to revisit in this collection of essays—much to hear and learn from.

The notion of border-living in the Balkans refers to a way of life that is historically grounded and which has long resisted the Western models of religio-national homogeneity by simultaneously affirming the borders among different groups and shaping the paths to cross those borders.

Finished Reading: On Lying and Politics by Hannah Arendt 📚

I have only ever dabbled in my reading of Hannah Arendt, but she has maintained a voice in my head for years. Not, in my experience, an easily accessible writer/thinker. Whoever put these chapters of hers together in this short book deserves credit for undoing this fact. Very essential questions that need to be asked by current and future generations are quite accessible in these pages. In fact, I don’t think there is one page or paragraph that doesn’t point to some question you should ask when you read tomorrow’s news.

The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my conclusions, my opinion. . . . Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge.

Finished Reading: American Journal by Tracy K. Smith 📚

I loved carrying this little anthology around in my pocket at work and having a good poem available at any moment. I couldn’t possibly say more than what Smith says in her intro. Here’s an excerpt.

Currently Reading: Why We Drive by Matthew Crawford 📚

I’m a couple chapters in, and so far it’s everything I hoped it would be, and more. I’m pausing after just about every paragraph to let the goosebumps settle. Crawford’s is a sorely needed mind.

Futurism is a genre of mythmaking that seeks to generate a feeling of inevitability around some desired outcome, a picture that is offered as though it were a prediction.

Finished Reading: Repair by C. K. Williams 📚

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,

nothing that we'd ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be admired or be repentant for,

but something to which we've never adequately given credence,

which might have consoling implications about how we misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,

that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

Finished Reading (2023): The Redress of Poetry by Seamus Heaney 📚

Ten perfectly and wonderfully thoughtful reflections on “the surprise of poetry as well as its reliability… its given, unforeseeable thereness.”

"To redress poetry... is to know and celebrate it not only as a matter of proffered argument and edifying content, but as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul. And this is why I have tried to profess the pleasure and surprise of poetry, its rightness and thereness, the way it is at one moment unforseeable and at the next indispensable, the way it arrives at something unhindered and self-directing, sweeping ahead into its full potential."