The Little Friar

This is my collection of Christian ethics books: These are challenging times for Christians who want to live out the full Gospel, especially for those who seek to understand how their faith intersects with the public realm. On the one hand, Christians must understand and distinguish themselves from other religious traditions who ground their moral lives only on the will of God. On the other hand, while Christians must ground their ethics in rationality, they must also build them on the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.  That is, they must do so if they wish to develop a Christian ethic.  But this means building an ethical system on a set of rules that is incomplete, in one very important sense.  Scripture is "incomplete" in that it does not contain within it prescriptions for every moral situation the Church faces (which isn't that surprising, but an important point nonetheless).  Determining how revelation guides ethics here and now is the task of ...

This week's selections are my pastoral care and counseling books.  Each of these has had a special role in my development as a pastor (FYI:  The APA Publication Manual is Kendra's for school -- both the BS Emergency Management program she's completing this year and the crisis counseling Master's program she's probably starting this fall).  It's honestly difficult to pick just one of these.  But the book I've chosen to highlight is Martin Buber's I and Thou . Pastoral care and counseling and the biblical tradition are so interwoven in the pastor's work, for whom the central task is healing that leads to wholeness with God and others (you'll notice that I intentionally shelved my counseling textbook from school with the classic Kirwan work, Biblical Concepts for Christian Counseling ).  Buber's book is one that interweaves the Jewish biblical tradition of relation with that wholeness.  In Buber's I and Thou wholeness is understood in...

Someone thought it'd be a fun idea to offer, as a Friday series for a while, pictures of books in my personal library. My criteria are fairly simple:  I'll post every Friday a different picture -- either of a collection of books on the same theme, or one book that has had unique impact on me.  Then I'll offer something of a personal reflection on the picture. The goal here, of course, is that folks get a window into those books that have made me who I am. Today's selection begins where I probably should begin here at The Little Friar -- with the shelf of my preaching books.  Of the shelf, if I had to pick the most important book, I'd have to say it's Bonhoeffer's Worldly Preaching (in the second picture, third book from the left).  Worldly Preaching offers a translation of Bonhoeffer's lectures on preaching to the seminary of the Confessing Church in Finkenwalde and a lengthy introduction to both Bonhoeffer as a preacher and his theolog...

I've recently ordered my own copy of Barth's Church Dogmatics -- it's only $199 for the set at christianbook.com right now.  So this morning I've been planning how to go about reading the full set in the coming weeks and months.  I haven't read the full collection since college; I read them over the summer one year, and have read each of the volumes individually since then, but it's been so long since I've worked through the Dogmatics as a whole. That made me think:  What have I done to absorb so much Barth without owning the Church Dogmatics ?  What would it look like for someone who's unfamiliar with Barth, and doesn't have the $200 bucks to put down for hardbacks, actually read to familiarize themselves with good ole Karl? Books by Barth 1.  First, there's Evangelical Theology:  An Introduction .  It's a simple, straightforward, heart-warming discussion of what it means to practice "evangelical theology".  This book probabl...

Like many people I picked up a love of books in college.  If I have a materialistic streak it comes out with books. When I was younger I was simply trying to acquire books to build a personal library.  So I just bought books.  Way more than I could read.  Simply having the books made me happy.  That's the materialistic aspect I struggled with.  The craving to own and acquire the books as physical objects.  Some years ago, my personal library had neared 2500 volumes, so when I was diagnosed with cancer, I had a need to downsize that collection. Over the past couple of years, though, I've begun rebuilding.  But I'm more disciplined about my buying books.  I typically have two or three books a week to review, but I tend to avoid buying unless it's a book from my (continually evolving) Amazon wish list. A part of the struggle in limiting my buying is simply how much I love bookstores and shopping for books.  Especially used books...

I have four different book projects in various states of completion: Faith Thinking: An Introduction to Theology for Students  will be the first to be published, probably in January 2015.  Thinking: An Introduction to Philosophy for Students  will be available in early 2015. The goal is by February.   God Gets What God Wants: Biblical & Theological Essays on Trinitarian Universalism  will be available in mid-2015. My goal is June or July.  And finally, I'm aiming for  Good News: Principalities, Powers & Preaching  to be published in late 2015 (October or November).

I oftentimes receive requests for a "top 10" book list, with folks asking me to identify the books that have shaped me theologically.  It's always so difficult to name just 10, and then to list them in some level of importance.  So, in an effort to honor an honest question, I've put together this list, with the following self-imposed rules:  No book is "off limits" (if it's had an indelible impact on my faith, it's here); these books aren't ranked (no book is more important than another in this list); and finally, this is my  list (someone else's will look very different). 1.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship 2.  Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man 3.  Geoffrey Wainwight, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life 4.  Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote 5.  Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom 6.  Roberta Bondi, Memories of God 7.  Thomas Oden, Pastoral Theology 8.  Thomas Langford, Reflections ...

Some years ago, as pastor of a church in search of a unifying and unified mission and vision statement, I introduced the congregation to "spiritual reading" -- lectio divina  -- in an effort to allow that congregation a chance to hear God in where they were headed.  For years they'd floundered and were beginning to lose hope in their mission.  That congregation was what we'd call a "graying congregation".  A decades-long decline in membership is often the cited reason.  But I don't think that's true.  The Church in America has so commodified and acquiesced to American culture that there's little of the power of the Gospel to draw folks in.  The ones who remain in leadership are faithful, but often dejected.   When the membership committee looked at the numbers, we had a sobering realization:  Nearly half of the congregational membership was 65 and older.  And 80% of the congregational membership was over 50.  Something had to be don...

Someone asked recently if I'd pick five theologians whose work have been  the most  influential on me, and the one book by each of the five.  I've agonized over a response -- this is like a parent picking a favorite child, then picking the one thing that child does so well -- but I owe a response.  I reserve the right to modify this list tomorrow (and every day thereafter), and yet, here goes: 1.  Karl Barth,  The Word of God and the Word of Man 2.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer,  Discipleship 3.  Roberta Bondi,  Memories of God 4.  Lesslie Weatherhead,  The Will of God 5.  Julian of Norwich,  Revelations of Divine Love

Once upon a time, kiddies, there was a book published every year whose title was Books In Print (it still is printed, evidently, though I can hardly imagine who would buy it now).  It included what it said on the cover -- the publication information for every book in the USA whose publisher had print copies available.  If you wanted to track down a book for library use, or to order a copy of your own, you would go to Books In Print , find it by title or author, write down the publication information, and convey that data to a librarian or bookseller.  As a college student -- and a regular reader -- I recall my nearly-weekly trek to the college library in order to retrieve this unwieldy volume from the shelf in the reference section.  Before the days of digital databases and Amazon and WorldCat, it may defy the imagination, but this is how I found my books.  The idea of having to go someplace and look something up in Books In Print (regular people didn't o...