Fall 2018 Reading List

Beyond my textbooks for school (which I certainly will read in full 👀), I present to you a list of books I plan to read between now and December 14th. Somebody out there, hold me accountable to this. Come nag at me if there are any I haven’t read by 12/14/18.

Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz

Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty

Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: an Existential Phenomenology of Religion

John Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve

John Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest

John Walton, The Lost Word of Scripture

Andrew Root, Faith Formation in a Secular Age

Andrew Root, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker

Robert Epstein, The Case Against Adolescence

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

John Santrock, Adolescence

Laurence Steinberg, Adolescence

P.J. Graham, The End of Adolescence

Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Trellis and the Vine

Don Carson, How Long, O Lord?

Jim Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Andrew Naselli, No Quick Fix

Charlie Wingard, Help for the New Pastor

Some of these are daunting. I may spend half the semester reading Charles Taylor’s book. I already tried once, got to about page 200 (of 800) and had to stop. The Agamben books are 6, 7, 8, and 9 of 9 in the Homo Sacer series, which I have spent much of the last year slogging through. Incredible stuff, but a slog. Opus Dei is about ethics and is supposedly the hardest one. The John Walton books are because I read The Lost World of Genesis One and it totally changed my perspective on creation. His other books are more or less the same methodology but on different topics.

The books from Andrew Root to P.J. Graham are for my Senior Thesis which I am writing in the spring semester. The rest are either books I’ve wanted to read for a while (Carson, Packer, and Arendt) or books I got at T4G back in April (Naselli, Marshall and Payne, and Wingard) or Bonhoeffer. Or idk why Darwin but I bought that book at the Darwin Center at the Natural History Museum in London because that seemed like the right place to buy it, if anywhere. Same with Arendt too. I bought that at Sachsenhausen in Germany because it seemed right.

These are also just spare time reading. My Greek and Hebrew (ugh) work will mostly be textbook work not book work, same with my final two philosophy classes and my undergrad Teaching the Bible course. So this book list may be all of the book books I read this semester.

Here’s to a semester of expanding my perspective on the Bible, on the Christian life, on youth ministry, and on the world. And to another semester of forgetting to update my “What I’m Reading” tab.