It’s the end of another year in which I read a few books—some by eye, some by ear; some by choice, some by requirement. As with each year’s list (see 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015, for reference), these are not necessarily books released in 2023 (though several are), but books that I encountered this year. Short reviews follow for a few, clustered around some broad categories.
As a seminary student (with a full-time job and four kids from 5 to 14), I also always want to give a special shout-out to our library’s excellent selection of audiobooks (via services like Hoopla and Libby) that I listen to on my daily commute and trips back and forth between Chattanooga and Atlanta, without which I would not get to go through nearly as many desired books as I’d like. Also, I don’t put all my seminary assignments here, but some do rise to the surface of recommended reads. I’ve listed “also-reads” this year in their respective categories—these books aren’t necessarily “second class”, I just can’t review ’em all. As a reminder, you can also find me on goodreads.com for more regular updates, as well as brief reviews of all these titles.
Christian Theology and Practice
The Ballot and the Bible by Kaitlyn Schiess (2023)
In a democratic republic like the United States, politics is part of life. For Christians in such a country, politics also inevitably becomes part of church life as well—the trick is managing engagement with political life in ways that neither withdraw from public concern nor place political considerations over the witness of the gospel. The ways we use the Bible to shore up some positions or push down others is often where this rubber meets the road. Schiess offers an excellent short book about—in essence—how to read the Bible faithfully and contextually, with special attention to passages often taken out of context to justify political actions. Worthy reading for an upcoming election year, to be sure.
The Evangelical Imagination by Karen Swallow Prior (2023)
As much as Westerners like to believe that we live by facts and science, the stories we tell and are told to weave facts together and make sense of them are more determinative of our beliefs and actions than we realize. Prior brings her literary expertise to bear on the narratives that have shaped the evangelical movement (from 18th century Britain to the present), at times honing and at times skewing the church’s witness to Christ. She reminds us that the narratives of Scripture and the life of Christ need to be given attention as much as the “data” of theology in cultivating faithfulness. Moreover the alternative stories we believe need to be recognized and analyzed to see where we may be led off the path.
Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction by Cory Brock and N. Gray Sutanto (2023)
The Dutch Reformed tradition of theology, specifically the mountains of work by Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), is having a renaissance in contemporary theological studies, owing largely to the last 2 decades of translation work on Bavinck’s corpus. Their approach, robustly Scriptural and attuned to the core concerns of modernity, is well suited to today’s church as well, thoughtfully applying the gospel to the most pressing questions of life. Of course, both Kuyper and Bavinck (and some of their disciples from Dutch background who wrote in English like Van Til and Hoekema) are notoriously hard to read and verbose. Brock & Sutanto synthesize a huge volume of material into 10 thematically organized chapters to provide an accessible overview to a stream of theology that the Western church would be greatly blessed to interact with more fully.
Redeeming Vision Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (2023)
First up in the ever-expanding sub-category of “books by friends” is this fabulous debut work. In a world filled with images, our eyes are veritably bombarded, and the most dangerous thing we can do in life is to fail to pay attention to what we see. In this deeply wise (and technical) book on art, Weichbrodt gives practical tools for “redemptive looking” that we can take to an art museum or to Instagram or to a news website to look closer and interpret what we see rather than simply absorbing it into our mental archives as a representation of the way things are. She covers a lot of content briskly, and keep readers engaged not just in the tools or the works discussed, but the story of how we look within the story God is telling in and through this beautiful, good, yet fallen world through the images His image-bearers create.
Also-reads in this category:
- Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero (2014)
- The Sexual Reformation by Aimee Byrd (2022)
- On Getting out of Bed by Alan Noble (2023)
Fiction and Poetry
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)
This is a justifiably popular novel with good character development and a well-rounded portrayal of the geology, natural world, and history of SW Virginia. It could be read by some as perpetuating Appalachian stereotypes (poverty, opioids, etc.), but I found it to be a believable window into some of the chief pathologies of contemporary American life (hollowing out of rural economies, idolatry of sports, the crumbling foster care system, etc.) through the lens of a solid and tender-hearted story of family against all odds. It felt at times a bit overlong (but since it’s a riff on Dickens, to be expected), contains a few technological anachronisms, and is a bit heavy-handed on language and crudities, but it mostly works with the subject matter.
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872)
I’ve not always been a fan of victorian novels…they can drag on and be overly moralistic. Eliot’s masterwork, however, drew me in quickly and shed bright and glorious light on the simple life of small and forgotten places that make the world go around—a meditation on how a saint or a great soul might appear in the midst of the mundane. As the iconic last line reads, “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (2022)
I should shudder to say that I “understand” the late Cormac McCarthy. At the very least, I sense a wavelength of humming dread in his books that connects with me at a sometimes-discomfiting level. I can’t help but to read him, because he is willing to gaze at aspects of the modern soul that few authors want to call attention to. Stella Maris and its twinned novel, The Passenger, tell the story of siblings Bobby and Alicia Western but really use the story as a point of entry into a discussion of the secrets of the universe. Stella Maris steps into along tradition of philosophical fiction, presenting an intimate dialogue on ultimate things, in the vein of Walker Percy’s Lancelot or Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov, that takes us directly into the abyss.
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (1995)
I read a lot of McCarthy late last year and the beginning of this year to prepare for his last two books. There is a relentless aspect to his fiction, a plodding cadence of his peculiar punctuation-less prose, but in The Crossing it achieves the quality of an abstract painting, carrying you along and absorbing your attention in a hard-to-describe beauty. It had another last-line showstopper: “After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.”
Also-reads in this category:
- Above Ground by Clint Smith (2023)
- Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (1979)
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1321)
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
- Time and Again by Jack Finney (1970)
General Nonfiction (History/Biography/Sociology/Philosophy/Psychology/Cultural Observation)
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (2021)
Time-management is a perennial concern in late capitalism—maybe we can achieve greatness, or at least happiness, by ever-increasing productivity. Burkeman pushes back on the field to suggest instead that we should measure effective time usage less in hours and more in lifetimes (four thousand weeks is +/- 80 years). In the grand scheme of things, rest and perseverance and focus on what is truly important become better metrics of productivity than hours worked or tasks completed. While not a religious writer, Burkeman’s thesis and research highlights Scriptural themes of Sabbath and the “numbering of days” (Ps. 90).
Differ We Must by Steve Inskeep (2023)
The world probably doesn’t need any more books about Abraham Lincoln, but the 16th president continues to fascinate. In more recent years, his skill as a political operator has come more to the fore—a more “realistic” Lincoln and less of a mythic figure. Steve Inskeep (host of NPR’s Morning Edition) taps into this with a portrait of Lincoln through 16 relationships of varying adversity, examining the ways he navigated partnership with or maneuvering around people with whom he adamantly disagreed to accomplish large goals. This is a book of history, but rich with lessons for today’s dug-in, zero-compromise politics—success often lies on the other side of learning to work with people who don’t conform to every tenet of your program.
Education in Black and White by Stephen Preskill (2021)
To the extent that social structures change for the better over time, it cannot be the work of one person or even a few, but a movement. Preskill sketches this thesis through the history of the Highlander Folk School and its impact on the labor and civil rights movements in the 20th Century. The secret to this success was found in dialogue education (facilitating discussion to allow local solutions to present themselves and local leaders to emerge) and decentralized efforts to overturn injustice. This bottom-up model of nonviolent activism (similar to what Vaclav Havel called “the power of the the powerless”) still holds promise against seemingly insurmountable problems.
How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith III (2021)
Clint Smith is an astute observer of cultural phenomena and interpersonal life (and I also thoroughly enjoyed his poetry collection, Above Ground, this year). Here, he travels around various sites in the U.S. (north and south), West Africa, and Europe to collect stories of the ways the narratives of the transatlantic slave trade, the plantation economy, and the lives of those enslaved are curated and retold. He pinpoints that the stories we tell about the past shape our present more than the facts of history themselves in this poetic and richly textured critique of the intentional and unintentional failure of collective memory of injustice.
Also-reads in this category:
- Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson (2015)
- American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherman (2006)
- Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond (2023)
- The World Ending Fire by Wendell Berry (2017)
Memoir/Spiritual Reflection
All My Knotted Up Life by Beth Moore (2023)
For those of us who grew up in 90s evangelicalism, Beth Moore and her Living Proof Ministries Bible studies were everywhere—at least for our moms and ladies from church (admittedly, I’ve never read or gone through one, because, you know, that stuff is only for the women, right?). In more recent years, as she’s become an unlikely firebrand standing up to abuse of women in the Southern Baptist Convention and was ultimtely squeezed out of her denomination, her voice and fervor have intrigued me. Her story of a childhood of both evangelical zeal and sinister abuse helps establish that the two “sides” of her work are not disconnected. I really appreciated this as a story of faith, faithfulness, life, love, and ministry, not to mention the weight of high-control religious communities, as well as some keen insights on how we actually remember things and tell stories.
Holy Unhappiness by Amanda Held Opelt (2023)
Another entry in the “by friends” column. Amanda offers a lovely reflection on the “emotional prosperity gospel”—that pernicious idea that God owes us a certain outcome in life in exchange for holding certain attitudes or following a certain script for our lives. More than that, though, she holds out a light in the dark for everyone who has doubted God’s goodness and care because life has not gone as they hoped or planned. Good insights into the ideas of the good life we inherit from consumer culture, and the ways Scripture and the Holy Spirit lovingly push back on them. The limited podcast series that the book inspired is excellent as well.
How to Inhabit Time by James K.A. Smith (2022)
I’ve been reading Jamie Smith for years, though sometimes I feel like he releases books faster than I can read them. This is quite a remarkable little work of practical philosophy, exploring the ways we tend to live untethered, “no-when” lives—acting as if we are neither responsible for nor affected by the concerns of our present moment and floating above the ways time reminds us of our creaturely limits. Smith reflects on his own life and the ways the past affects the present and future, and points to Christian practices like Sabbath and the liturgical calendar as antidotes to our disconnection from the flow of history.
You Could Make this Place Beautiful Maggie Smith (2023)
Smith, a celebrated contemporary poet, opens up about the experience of professional success coinciding with personal suffering. This lyrical, non-traditional memoir. Smith calls it a “tell-mine” or a “tell-part”, contra the “tell-all” frame many expect from such a story. In essence, she offers a circular meditation on the post-mortem of a marriage, cultivating empathy for those experiencing the collapse of their worlds, and highlighting the ways the simplest events and items take on outsized significance in retrospect.
Also-reads in this category:
- Native by Kaitlin B. Curtice (2020)
- Living Resistance by Kaitlin B. Curtice (2023)
- Let There Be Art by Rachel Marie Kang (2022)
- Evangelical Anxiety by Charles Marsh (2022)
Re-Reads
“We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.” – C.S. Lewis, “On Stories”
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)
Robinson’s breakout, Pulitzer-winning novel still resonates nearly 20 years later. It’s epistolary style ties together historical and theological threads through the lens of the complex legacy of family. The older I get, the more I see John Ames’ perspective in wondering what he is leaving behind. The more I read Robinson, the more I appreciate her wisdom and facility for memorable one-line statements.
The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (1977)
I picked this one up for the first time in ages after meeting Mrs. Paterson at the HopeWords conference in April. Hearing her speak on her philosophy of children’s literature—namely treating children as human beings, and allowing her characters to experience the fullness of life’s joys and sorrows. There are few books that introduce the pain and wrestling with death so expertly, and the climactic scene of Jess and his his father talking by the creek goes so hard into emotional and spiritual depths that you forget you’re reading a children’s book.
True Grit by Charles Portis (1968)
Few novels can claim to have inspired multiple successful film adaptations (1969 and 2010) and still maintain its popularity as book. Portis’ Mattie Ross remains one of my favorite narrator voices—crisp and incisive, with definite opinions, and undertones of pride and regret. This time through, I was struck by how he writes Ross as an old woman reliving the only episode in her long life she felt truly herself, and wondering what has become of the rest of her days. Of course, it’s also a rollicking good Western, but Mattie’s heart gives it an enduring power.
Also-reads in this category:
- The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)
- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961)
- ReSet by David Murray (2012)
Image: American Sign Museum, Hamilton County, Ohio, December 2023