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."

Finished Reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear 📚

Finished Reading (2023): On Getting Out of Bed by Alan Noble 📚

Finished Reading (2023): Life Worth Living by Miroslav Volf 📚

Finished Reading (2023): Quiet Power & Quiet The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 📚

Finished Reading: The Home of God by Miroslav Volf 📚

The New Jerusalem does not compensate for anything; it is the final form of the true life to be lived in history, whether in affliction or in joy. This story as a whole makes the life of the follower of Christ intelligible.

I love reading anything from Volf. His perspective is always fresh and clarifying. I’m really looking forward to his next book, which comes out next week—especially because anything with an endorsement from Marilynne Robinson is worth reading. (Thanks to my friend Luke for pointing that out!)

Jonathan Raban, Richard Wilbur, and Christian Wiman—a thought on what was missing in Raban’s Bad Land 📚

Finished Reading: Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman 📚

For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things
and I will ride this tantrum back to God

until my fixed self, my fluorescent self
my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self
withers in me like a salted slug

Finished Reading: Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban 📚

“…sketching a fantastic future for the land, with an Olympian disregard for what was actually here.”

We watched John Wayne’s McLintock no less than 100x on VHS growing up. It’s not Montana, but this scene kept coming back to mind.

Finished Reading: Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri ní Dochartaigh 📚

Thin places are double rooted.

I only got through part 1. It’s beautifully written and full of heart, but the chapters are a bit repetitive. I needed to move on to something else, but I do recommend it.