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 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015, for reference), these are not necessarily books released in 2024 (though several are), but books that I encountered this year. Short reviews follow for a few, clustered around some broad categories.

This year, I graduated from seminary in May, so I thought I’d have more time to read more that I wanted to (rather than only what was assigned), but the tradeoff of no longer have weekly trips back and forth between Chattanooga and Atlanta to listen to audiobooks. Also, my office moved from Lookout Mountain down into downtown Chattanooga this summer, cutting my daily commute time by half. Enough is as good as a feast, though. And it was a blessing to have more time to rest and to resume watching movies, too. Maybe a film list will start to show up here, too.

As usual, 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 / Biblical Studies

Loving Disagreement by Matt Mikulatos and Kathy Khang (2023)
Much is made—especially in an election year—about the need to “put aside” our divisions or to “be peacemakers” with those who hold opposing viewpoints. What Mikulatos and Khang share in their helpful dialogue (the book is written in a back-and-forth style with different sections by each coauthor) is that it is precisely in leaning into division and disagreement is where true peace is found. Loving our enemies doesn’t mean pretending they aren’t enemies, and bridging divides doesn’t mean pretending the division isn’t real or isn’t a serious and enduring matter. They point to the example of Christ (particularly in his interactions with the Pharisees and teachers of the Law) to give ground to their approach, and share freely from their personal relationships and the ways they’ve grown and changed through loving across lines.

Nobody’s Mother by Sandra Glahn (2023)
Understanding and interpreting the cultural context of biblical texts is frought work—it is easy to find a cultural hobby-horse to beat texts into a shape unknown to church history and practice, but it is equally dangerous to ignore the usage of words and terms or import contemporary sociocultural or political concerns into texts that never intended to speak to such issues. In researching the cult of Ephesian Artemis, Glahn gives a masterclass in how to properly handle cultural exegesis of extrabiblical matters that hover in the background of the biblical text and offers a solid deep dive on what, precisely, Paul may have meant in one of the most confusing passages in the New Testament, 1 Tim. 2:15. Naturally, there are lots of implications for hermeneutics of all Scriptures written to the church at Ephesus (1-2 Timothy, Ephesians, and Rev. 2:1-7).

We Become What We Normalize by David Dark (2023)
Dark, Associate Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University, is one of the most earnest, honest, people you’ll meet on social media, stirring pots that have grown scummy and holding a light on corners of institutions (or “myths with budgets” as he calls them) and governments that would prefer to remain in the dark. In this slim volume, he urges us (Americans in general and Americans who claim the name of Jesus in particular) to walk in the truth and not to sit still for evils, indignities, cruelties, and asininities uttered in our presence. It’s a little gem of moral seriousness in the vein of Havel and Baldwin and Thurman.

The Human Condition by Thomas Keating (1999)
This summer, I joined a book club at a local Anglican church that was studying Keating’s works on centering prayer. It turned out to be me and 14 women (I worried I’d accidentally crashed a women’s group when I showed up, though it’s just how the open enrollment panned out), and we had a wonderful season of practicing prayer and discussing Keating’s works together. I’ve found the work of prayer to be by turns the most natural and most confounding aspect of my walk with Jesus, and Keating’s punchy little book gives much to mull on in this discipline—namely, that we have an ally in prayer in the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, and God calls us sometimes to simply sit in His presence and open our hearts to what He would have us see and know, that the conversation of prayer is not a one-way monologue of our own words and thoughts.

Also-reads in this category:

• Imagining the Kingdom by James K. A. Smith (2013)
• Awaiting the King by James K. A. Smith (2017)
• Open Mind, Open Heart by Thomas Keating (1988)
• Disarming Leviathan by Caleb E. Campbell (2024)
• The Wood Between the Worlds by Brian Zahnd (2024)

Fiction and Poetry

Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse (1915)
I used to always try to read a Wodehouse short story between longer, serious works as a “palate cleanser.” Sure, he’s fun and funny, but does he have anything to say? The older I get, though, the more I see Wodehouse as the canary in the coal mine of late capitalism—his characters bumble through life trying to figure out how to spend mountains of time and money in a world devoid of significance. One of his first pieces on this nature, Something Fresh (which, for aficionados, fits within the Blandings universe of characters) came out during WWI, but makes no mention of the war. Escapism? Sure, but also perhaps a sly way of saying that the elites that marched the country to war had nothing better to do than wander about a castle in the dark trying to steal collector’s items.

Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman (2023)
Wiman is perhaps one of the premier metaphysical poets writing today (he may bristle at the description, but I mean that he focuses his gaze on human interplay with the supernatural and eternal). I’ve been enjoying his work since hearing him speak in New York in 2013, and he writes about the moral qualities of suffering so well. Here, poetry (his, and others’) blends with memoir-style essays to bring readers into delightful (and I mean delight in the serious, spiritual sense, rather than simply smirking at turns of phrase) meditations on the meaning of life (or lack thereof) that some of us call “faith.” Grab a pen and underline at will.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset (1920)
I try to read at least one MASSIVE book per year, and this classic that earned Undset the Nobel prize has been on my list for a while (largely thanks to Jessica Hooten Wilson’s writing on it). Framed as three stages in the life of a Norwegian woman in the middle ages, Undset presents a very human epic, looking straight at the ways sin and social customs make a mess of our lives and how ordinary graces make even the messiest lives beautiful in time. There are scenes of great beauty and lines worth remembering, but it is the detailed scope of the sweep of a life (the choices we make or are made for us and their outworking in the communities we inhabit) that make it so powerful.

A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines (1983)
I was reading The Need to Be Whole by Wendell Berry this year, and he mentioned his friendship with Gaines going back to their days together as Stegner fellows at Stanford as well as the power of Gaines’ work in this book to illuminate some key threads Berry had explored since at least The Hidden Wound (1968), so I had to give it a shot. It is indeed a powerful book—A brisk, mystery-esque plot that manages to weave together massive themes of race, justice, agrarianism, and family honor with humor and pathos. Gaines articulates, perhaps better than any fiction I’ve yet read, the loss of meaning that comes with loss of place, and the ways racial animosity is by turns both eased and exacerbated by the changes of modern, urbanized life.

Also-reads in this category:

• New Year Letter by W.H. Auden (1940)—REREAD
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021)
• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (2023)
• I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger (2024)
• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (2023)
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927)—REREAD
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)—REREAD (as a family read-aloud)
• For the Time Being by W.H. Auden (1940)—REREAD
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1869)

General Nonfiction (History/Biography/Sociology/Philosophy/Psychology/Cultural Observation)

God Gave Rock and Roll to You by Leah Payne (2024)
For someone who grew up listening pretty much only to Christian music (which included the expanding array of CCM artists in the 1990s), Payne’s book—a definitive history of the Christian recording industry from WWII to the present—felt like a trip down memory lane. I cringed remembering scandals that were whispered about certain artists, and smiled at the rehearsal of trends and fads that marked my youth group days. Fundamentally, Payne takes a historian’s critical eye toward the received narrative of Christian music as either a cheap knock-off of the mainstream or an artistic outgrowth of a robust evangelical subculture, and shows instead the complexity of an industry trying to make genuine contributions to the spiritual life of Christians and also creating a culture-shaping phenomenon that helped solidify the identity of American evangelicals as a socio-political unit with the goal of impacting the nation’s political future.

City Limits by Megan Kimble (2024)
From my review at Englewood Review of Books: “In the United States in the decades since World War II, the vision of the good life has been defined, even created, by the automobile. Its allure of speed, convenience, privacy, and independence is part of our national culture. Kimble dives deep into the history of U.S. highway policy to illuminate the seen and unseen costs of how we as a people have enacted our vision. While this at times requires technical arguments, she structures her inquiry around the stories of three major projects in three Texas cities (Houston, Austin, and Dallas) and specific individuals, families, and institutions standing in the way of the seemingly almighty Texas Department of Transportation. Kimble’s narrative engagingly rehearses much of what environmental activists and community development practitioners have been saying for decades.”

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2024)
If you know me at all, you’ve probably heard me talk about Kimmerer’s masterpiece, Braiding Sweetgrass—a work that both reflects and shapes my ways of observing the created world and its implications and intimations for our daily life and spiritual sensibility. Here, in a much shorter volume, Kimmerer offers a brief summation of some of the ground she covers in Braiding Sweetgrass with more argumentation than stories and good interaction with relevant academic literature on gift economies (such as Lewis Hyde and others write about). She draws bright lines here to point us to the ways our sense of privatization and consumption as the only measures of economic life leave so much out of the equation, and leave so many behind. All flourishing is mutual, and we ignore that lesson at our own peril.

Belonging by bell hooks (2004)
I’m a latecomer to hooks’ work, but have been blessed by her voice over the past few years. In Belonging, she puts forth a series of essays on her upbringing in rural Kentucky, her decision to return to Kentucky as an adult after finding nowhere else around the country to feel like home, and the nature of place as foundational to identity and health. She speaks of the idea of “ecological intelligence”—the need for each of us to cultivate a sense of the interconnectedness of things and the surroundings that sustain us—and explores the ways art, language, and values flow from the places we reside. Her perspective as a black woman from the South inflects the discussion, taking into account the way injustice and cruelty assault places as well as people, and looking for a sense of wholeness that acknowledges wounds while seeking connection.

Also-reads in this category:

• The Need to Be Whole by Wendell Berry (2021)
• The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta (2023)
• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (2023)
• The Gift by Lewis Hyde (1979)

Memoir/Spiritual Reflection

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair (2023)
My perception of Rastafarianism, like most Americans, was limited to a few Bob Marley tracks or comedic portrayals on film, so Sinclair’s book was revelatory. She unpacks the history and nature of this relatively new religion through a story of childhood abuse and instability wrought by her fathers’ rigid fundamentalist beliefs. It is also a story of her mother’s patience and zeal for education, and learning to find herself as a woman in a world of men and as a human being in search of meaning through poetry. Powerful and lyrical storytelling that resonates with the dangers inherent in many other separatist religious traditions.

Surrender by Bono (2022)
I’m always a bit skeptical of books by famous people—notoriety is not synonymous with writing skill or with pathos—but as a longtime U2 listener, I was willing to give this a chance after seeing several friends give positive reviews. Bono turns out to be a decent writer (of songs, yes, but also of prose), and has put together a heartfelt and thoughtful, if at times a bit maudlin, memoir of losing a mother and gaining a global family of musicians, artists and activists. At times, it feels a bit “Forrest Gump” (placing the author at significant historical moments and with powerful people), mostly because famous people tend to know other famous people. The structure of pairing stories with the songs that flow out of them is a useful narrative device, and gives some insight into well-known tunes.

Healing What’s Within by Chuck deGroat (2024)
As I have, like many in my generation, spent a number of years trying to make sense of my life story through therapy, poetry, literature, etc., I’m pretty conversant with the language of psychology and neurobiology and don’t often find new leaves to turn over. Besides, knowing something about yourself is only a step on the path to embodying it in practice. What deGroat (whose past work on narcissism and spiritual leadership is invaluable) shows here is how even the good things (particularly spiritual language and practices) that we build our identities around can function as addictions, masking us to the wounds in our souls that Jesus wants to heal in us. It’s a lesson that will likely take a lifetime to fully take to heart, but I’m thankful for the language to frame it.

Also-reads in this category:

• How Far to the Promised Land by Esau McCauley (2023)
• The Hope in Our Scars by Aimee Byrd (2024) (full review at Englwood Review)
• How to Walk Into a Room by Emily P. Freeman (2024)

Image: The Palace of Fine Arts, San Fransisco, Calif., August 2024