The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Mark Noll

One of the most interesting ways to grasp a general sense of Christian history is to examine critical turning points in that story. But why, the question might be raised, be concerned about church history at all? Why think that any sort of knowledge about the Christian past—which can so easily seem obscure, petty, confusing, or complex—should interest or assist Christian believers in the present?

Studying the history of Christianity provides repeated, concrete demonstration concerning the irreducibly historical character of the Christian faith.

Since Christianity is not captured simply in a set of dogmas, a moral code, or a picture of the universe—though Christianity certainly involves dogmas, morality, and a worldview—since Christianity is ultimately the acts of God in time and space, centrally the acts of God in Christ, then to study the history of Christianity is continually to remember the historical character of Christian faith.

To be sure, there are dangers in taking history seriously. Throughout the entire history of Christianity, problems have constantly arisen when believers equate the human acts of the church with the acts of God, when Christians assume that using the name of God to justify their actions in space and time is the same as God himself acting. But that danger grows from a positive reality: to be a Christian is to have an infinite stake in the events of God-in-Christ, with all that led up to the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, and all that now flows from those realities in the shape of the church’s history.

Study of church history should increase our humility about who we are and what we believe. Even more than humility, a study of the Christian past can also engender profound gratitude. Despite a dazzling array of God-honoring triumphs and despite a wide and deep record of godliness among believers of high estate and low, the sad fact is that the church’s history is often a sordid, disgusting tale.

Once students push beyond sanitized versions of Christian history to realistic study, it is clear that self-seeking, rebellion, despotism, pettiness, indolence, cowardice, murder (though dignified with God-talk), and the lust for power along with all other lusts have flourished in the church almost as ignobly as in the world at large.

Despite a tangled history, the promise of the Savior concerning the church has been fulfilled: “the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” But precisely that tangled history points to the reason why Christianity has endured: “I will build my church.”

*Excerpt from Mark Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. Baker Academic, 2012. Brief summary at Publisher’s Weekly, lengthier summary on Study God’s Word Together blog.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 41 (Listen – 5:00)
Revelation 11 (Listen – 3:24)

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Andy Crouch

I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so.

Why aren’t we known as cultivators—people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren’t we known as creators—people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?

Many attempts, especially Christian attempts, to come to terms with culture have fallen short because they paid too much attention to [individual] categories of culture. High culture, pop culture, ethnic culture, political culture—all are part of culture and worthy of attention, reflection and action. But culture is more than any of these things.

Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else. This is the original insight of the writer of Genesis. God, of course, began with nothing, whereas we begin with something. But the difference is not as great as you might think. For every act of creation involves bringing something into being that was not there before—every creation is ex nihilo, from nothing, even when it takes the world as its starting point.

Changing the world sounds grand, until you consider how poorly we do even at changing our own little lives. I sometimes wonder if breathless rhetoric about changing the world is actually about changing the subject—from our own fitfully suppressed awareness that we did not ask to be brought into this world, have only vaguely succeeded at figuring it out, and will end our days in radical dependence on something or someone other than ourselves.

So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another’s lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together, make something of the world.

*Excerpt from Andy Crouch, Culture-Making: Recovering our Creative Calling. IVP Books, 2013. Book review at The Gospel Coalition.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 40 (Listen – 5:09)
Revelation 10 (Listen – 1:59)

 

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Curt Thompson, MD

Despite all we know about shame, containing it, let alone disposing of it, is a bit like grasping for mercury: the more pressure you use to seize it, the more evasive it becomes.

Typically, whenever researchers study and discuss shame, we do so as though it is some abstract emotional or cognitive phenomena. We describe shame as something we would do well to better regulate, but not as an entity that has a conscious will of its own.

But I believe we live in a world in which good and evil are not just events that happen to us but rather expressions of something or someone whose intention is for good or for evil. And I will suggest that shame is used with this intention to dismantle us as individuals and communities, and destroy all of God’s creation.

Putting shame to death is not simply about addressing it as a deeply destructive emotional and relational nuisance. For we cannot speak of shame without speaking of creation and God’s intention for it. From the beginning it has been God’s purpose for this world to be one of emerging goodness, beauty and joy. Evil has wielded shame as a primary weapon to see to it that that world never happens.

Consequently, to combat shame is not merely to wrestle against something we detest. Shame is not just a consequence of something our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to corrupt our relationships with God and each other and disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity.

Shame, therefore, is not simply an unfortunate, random, emotional event that came with us out of the primordial evolutionary soup. It is both a source and result of evil’s active assault on God’s creation, and a way for evil to try to hold out until the new heaven and earth appear at the consummation of history.

Combating shame requires more work than you might imagine. Shame’s power lies not so much in facts that we can clarify but rather in its emotional state, which is so much harder to shake.

Throughout this book you will read the stories of people like you and me who are wrestling with shame and doing their best to fix their eyes on Jesus, do what he did, and despise it on the way to being liberated to create as they were so intended from the beginning.

*Excerpt from Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves. IVP Books, 2015. Book review at Hearts and Minds Books.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 39 (Listen – 1:35)
Revelation 9 (Listen – 3:30)

 

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Sherry Turkle

We are being silenced by our technologies—in a way, “cured of talking.” These silences—often in the presence of our children—have led to a crisis of empathy that has diminished us at home, at work, and in public life.

I begin my case by turning to someone many people think of—mistakenly—as a hermit who tried to get away from talk. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to a cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, to learn to live more “deliberately”—away from the crush of random chatter. But the cabin furniture he chose to secure that ambition suggests no simple “retreat.” He said that in his cabin there were “three chairs—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.”

These three chairs plot the points on a virtuous circle that links conversation to the capacity for empathy and for self-reflection. Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in a more productive solitude.

Technology disrupts this virtuous circle.

The disruptions begin with solitude, Thoreau’s first chair. Recent research shows that people are uncomfortable if left alone with their thoughts, even for a few minutes. We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve.

And this is where the virtuous circle breaks down: Afraid of being alone, we struggle to pay attention to ourselves. And what suffers is our ability to pay attention to each other. If we can’t find our own center, we lose confidence in what we have to offer others.

I’m not suggesting that we turn away from our devices. To the contrary, I’m suggesting that we look more closely at them to begin a more self-aware relationship with them. So, my argument is not anti-technology. It’s pro-conversation.

We miss out on necessary conversations when we divide our attention between the people we’re with and the world on our phones. Or when we go to our phones instead of claiming a quiet moment for ourselves. We have convinced ourselves that surfing the web is the same as daydreaming. That it provides the same space for self-reflection. It doesn’t.

It’s time to put technology in its place and reclaim conversation.

*Excerpt from Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Press, 2015. Book review in The New York Times.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 38 (Listen – 3:20)
Revelation 8 (Listen – 2:15)

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Karen Swallow Prior

“This is a celebration of a particular woman, but also of women in general. It is the story of one person’s faith, but also of the power of faith. It is the story of God’s grace pouring into and through one life to impact many others. It is the story of God-given gifts given back to God to be used for the benefit of others.” — David, Park Forum Reader

“Come! Let us ride to London to see bishops and booksellers!” The invitation comes from a small girl standing atop a wooden chair. Her bright eyes sparkle. The chairs have become a carriage, and the girl, Hannah More, is about to embark on an imaginary ride from this little village all the way to the bustling metropolis of London to see the men whose words she knows, even at this young age, have the power to shape the world: the bishops and the booksellers.

[Years later,] Buoyed by empty streets, the shouts of Bristol’s town crier echoed into the city churches and down the aisles, startling the worshippers assembled as usual one midsummer Sunday morning. The crier announced a reward of one guinea to anyone who would bring forward a runaway African girl who’d fled into hiding.

The girl’s master had threatened, for some unknown reason, to ship her to a slave-trading island to be sold, and she’d disappeared. Although slavery had been illegal within the borders of England and Wales since 1772, a “domestic servant” from Africa, such as this girl, was common.

The reward offered for the girl’s return, one guinea, was the British coin minted by Bristol’s Royal African Company as currency for trade in western Africa. In its original language, guinea meant “black person.” The morning’s worship was being interrupted by the offer of a guinea for a Guinea. Twenty shillings for a few stone of flesh.

Sometime after the solemnity of the city’s worship had been broken by the town crier, the girl was found, and the “trembling wretch was dragged out from a hole in the top of a house, where she had hid herself, and forced on board ship.”

The account is recorded by More, who was living in the countryside outside Bristol at the time. “Alas!” More wrote in a letter to a friend, “I did not know it till too late, or I would have run the risk of buying her.”

When she wrote this letter in 1790, More had been actively immersed in the fight against the slave trade for a long time. By the power of her pen, she would journey to London for real—not only in her childhood imagination—where she would see bishops and booksellers, and more, much, much more.

*Excerpt from Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist. Thomas Nelson, 2014. Book review at The Gospel Coalition.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 35 (Listen – 1:43)
Revelation 5 (Listen – 2:39)

This Weekend’s Readings
Isaiah 36 (Listen – 4:00) Revelation 6 (Listen – 3:12)
Isaiah 37 (Listen – 6:37) Revelation 7 (Listen – 2:56)