Certainly my love for reading is no secret, and one of the aspects of my time in seminary I have enjoyed the most is being exposed to an entire world of authors and thinkers I may or may not have come in contact with before. Natural this has caused my personal library to grow. Below are the top 10 books I read in 2016. Some are from required class reading, others are books I read for my own enrichment. Each title links to the book on Amazon, and below each title are a few quotes that I snagged as I flipped through my highlights from when I originally read the book to give you a taste of the book's focus. Would love to hear your favorite reads from 2016 that I can add to my reading list for 2017!
10. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation - Parker Palmer
"The deepest vocational question is not 'What ought I to do with my life?' It is the more elemental and demanding 'Who am I? What is my nature?'" - p. 15
"If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials. We must honor our limitations in ways that do not distort our nature, and we must trust and use our gifts in ways that fulfill the potentials God gave us." - p. 55
9. Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World - Richard Mouw
"This is a call to civility. God is telling the Israelites - and us - that neither indifference nor hostility is a proper way of treating our pagan neighbors. We must seek their shalom. Indeed, it is in pursuing the shalom of others that we realize our own shalom." - p. 70
"Genuine listening involves a willingness to be changed by what we hear. We cannot hope to transform others without a commitment to being transformed ourselves." - p. 126
8. Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human - John Mark Comer
"As people made in his image - all work is artistic. All work is inherently creative. All work - from painting to parenting - is reshaping the raw materials of Planet Earth in such a way that it's how God intended, how it's supposed to be, all so humans can thrive as they see God's glory." - p. 125
"That's why Sabbath is an expression of faith. Faith that there is a Creator and he's good. We are his creation. This is his world. We live under his roof, drink his water, eat his food, breathe his oxygen. So on the Sabbath, we don't just take a day off from work; we take a day off from toil. We give him all our fear and anxiety and stress and worry. We let go. We stop ruling and subduing, and we just be. We 'remember' our place in the universe. So that we never forget...There is a God, and I'm not him." - p. 198
7. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation - Miroslav Volf
"In light of the justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness. Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion - without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person's humanity and imitate God's love for him. And when one knows that God's love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God's justice and so rediscover one's own sinfulness." - p. 124
"Stricken with the sense of sinfulness, should we withdraw from making judgments and working for justice? Abdication of responsibility will be tempting to those who only know how to live in a world neatly divided into territories of pure light and of utter darkness. But no such world exists, except in the imagination of the self-righteous; the construction of such a world is itself an act of injustice. In a world shot through with injustice, the struggle for justice must be carried on by people inescapably tainted by injustice. Hence the importance of "double vision." We need to see our judgments about justice and our struggle against injustice through the eyes of the other - even the manifestly 'unjust other' - and be willing to readjust our understanding of justice and repent of acts of injustice." - p. 218
6. Artists, Citizens, Philosophers: Seeking the Peace of the City - Duane K. Friesen
"Any ecumenical vision must be clear about the identity of the church. Though we share much in common with our fellow humans, being a follower of Christ places us at odds with many of the dominant values of our culture (e.g., rampant consumerism, a culture of violence, ecological destruction, and radical disparities between the rick and the poor). We are 'in' Babylon. How can the church sing God's song in the midst of the dominant music of our culture when it sings songs of triumphant nationalism, or racial and ethnic supremacy and hatred, songs glorifying and trusting in the power of technology for deliverance?" - p. 34
"The church fails to model an alternative vision of life when it becomes politicized by adopting the power tactics of any other lobby. The church needs to think of itself as a 'pilgrim' people of an alternative way. The cross of Christ, who renounced traditional forms of political power by making himself vulnerable, models such a way. I am not suggesting that the church withdraw from politics. But what would happen if the church were to model an alternative nonviolent politics of solidarity with the weak and the marginalized that still respects the dignity and the humanity of those in positions of power who violate the weak?" - p. 134
5. The Prophetic Imagination - Walter Brueggemann
"So my programmatic urging is that every act of a minister who would be prophetic is part of a way of evoking, forming, and reforming an alternative community. And this applies to every facet and every practice of ministry. It is a measure of our enculturation that the various acts of ministry (for example, counseling, administration, even liturgy) have taken on lives and functions of their own rather than being seen as elements of the one prophetic ministry of formation and reformation of alternative community." - p. 4
"Hope, on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question...The language of hope and the ethos of amazement have been partly squelched because they are a threat." - p. 65
4. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption - Bryan Stevenson
"Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I've come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned." - p. 17-18
"...mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven't earned it, who haven't even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion." - p. 314
3. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit - James K.A. Smith
"...not all sins are decisions. Because we tend to be intellectualists who assume that we are thinking things, we construe temptation and sin accordingly: we think temptation is an intellectual realist, where some idea is presented to us that we then think about and make a conscious choice to pursue (or not). But once you realize that we are not just thinking things but creatures of habit, you'll then realize that temptation isn't just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it's often a factor of de-formation and wrongly ordered habits." - p. 54
"Worship works from the top down, you might say. In worship we don't just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn't just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts." - p. 77
2. The Politics of Jesus - John Howard Yoder
"The cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to the kingdom, nor is it even the way to the kingdom; it is the kingdom come." - p. 51
"Jesus was not just a moralist whose teachings had some political implications; he was not primarily a teacher of spirituality whose public ministry unfortunately was seen in a political light; he was not just a sacrificial lamb preparing for his immolation, or a God-Man whose divine status calls us to disregard his humanity. Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e., promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships." - p. 52
1. Strength to Love - Martin Luther King Jr.
"We preachers have also been tempted by the enticing cult of conformity. Seduced by the success symbols of the world, we have measured our achievements by the size of our parsonage. We have become showmen to please the whims and caprices of the people. We preach comforting sermons and avoid saying anything from our pulpit that might disturb the respectable views of the comfortable members of our congregations. Have we ministers of Jesus Christ sacrificed truth on the altar of self-interest and, like Pilate, yielded our convictions to the demands of the crowd? We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patters of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants." - p. 16
"Above all, we must be reminded anew that God is at work in his universe. He is not outside the world looking on with a sort of cold indifference. Here on all the roads of life, he is striving in our striving. Like an ever-loving Father, he is working through history for the salvation of his children. As we struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with us. Evil dies on the seashore, not merely because of man's endless struggle against it, but because of God's power to defeat it." - p. 83
"We must face the shameful fact that the church is the most segregated major institution in American society, and the most segregated hour of the week is, as Professor Liston Pope has pointed out, eleven o'clock on Sunday morning. How often the church has been an echo rather than a voice, a taillight behind the Supreme Court and other secular agencies, rather than a headlight guiding men progressively and decisively to higher levels of understanding." - p. 105