A 2025 Reading Retrospective

 

Thanks to a winter semester sabbatical, I was on pace to complete more than a book per week in 2025, but non-teaching-related reading took a nose dive when classes resumed, and I ended the year at 49 books—just shy of my goal of 52. Maybe next year?

Of the 49, I count 23 audiobooks and approximately 12 works of fiction, including such weighty tomes as E.B. White’s Stuart Little. As usual, my lightly annotated list is below.

Reading Highlights 

Perhaps because it is the last thing I listened to in 2025, Alan Noble’s excellent short theological reflection On Getting Out of Bed stands out as a general interest highlight. 

Another book I can’t commend highly enough is the Librivox recording of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius was one of those “I should really have read this by now” books. Completely fascinating, not least because it is a primary source compendium for many of the critical “introductory” questions that still occupy biblical scholars. Why did I wait so long?

My own reading highlight was (finally) finishing the Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek. I wrote about it here.

Current Events / History / Memoir

Ali, Ayaan Hirsi. Infidel. New York: Atria Books, 2008. (Audiobook)

Fascinating for many reasons, including the overlap with my own more limited memories of Kenya and Somalia in the 1980’s. 

Arnold, John. History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford : New York: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000.

Beinart, Peter. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. New York: Knopf, 2025. (Audiobook)

Recommended. See this post for more reflections.

Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020. (Audiobook)

A Palestinian perspective that pairs nicely with Beinart.

Kirsch, Adam. On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. Norton, 2024. (Audiobook)

Made some good points, but not against Khalidi.

Plokhy, Serhii. The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. Norton, 2024. (Audiobook)

Rosen, Jeffrey. The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024. (Audiobook)

Wacker, Grant. One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024. (Audiobook)

Reads like a history of 20th-century North American evangelicalism

Biblical Studies

Anderson, Gary A. Sin: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. (Audiobook)

Blogged here 

Barton, John. A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths. Penguin Books, 2020. (Audiobook)

Davis, Ellen F. Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. Cambridge, Mass: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001. (Audiobook)

Eusebius of Caesarea. History of the Christian Church. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert, 1890. Librivox recording, 2009. (Audiobook)

One of those “I should really have read this by now” books. Why did I wait so long? 

Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. 3d ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.

Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Recommended by the proprietor of Crux Books at Wycliffe College in 1999; I finally read it 26 years later. I wasn’t ready for it then; not sure I’m ready for it now. But now that I have read it, I notice its influence everywhere. Takes the prize for worst academic writing. 

Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. Romans: A Commentary. NTL. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2024.

Gaventa’s major commentary has a high new idea to page ratio. The comparison with Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans is apt; it suffers from the same weaknesses. Well worth reading, but I won’t be assigning it as an undergraduate textbook again.

Hays, Richard B. Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2014.

The man at the desk next to mine at Tyndale House kept telling me I should read it. “It will do your soul good,” he said. I did. It did.

Lentz, John Clayton. Luke’s Portrait of Paul. SNTSMS 77. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Moffitt, David. Rethinking the Atonement: New Perspectives on Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022.

Nongbri, Brent. God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.

Takes the prize for the most exciting (modern) academic book this year ... in a bittersweet way: Nongbri fills in the picture of the manuscripts behind our critical Greek New Testaments and makes you wonder about what has been lost.

Novenson, Matthew V. Paul, Then and Now. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022.

Smith, David Andrew. Luke and the Jewish Other: Politics of Identity in the Third Gospel. New York: Routledge, 2023.

Stulac, Daniel J. D. Gift of the Grotesque: A Christological Companion to the Book of Judges. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024. (Audiobook)

So substantial the audiobook left me with impressions only. Purchased a paper copy.

Witherington, Ben. A Week in the Life of Corinth. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012.

Fiction, but not literature

Wright, N. T. Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul’s Greatest Letter. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2023. (Audiobook)

Helpful to think with, but not finally compelling

Fiction / English Literature

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: Egerton, 1817. (reread)

Caldwell, Bo. City of Tranquil Light. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010. (Audiobook)

Forster, E. M. A Room with a View. London: Penguin, 1908. (reread)

Heaney, Seumus. The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Hilton, James. Random Harvest. New York: Pocket Books, 1941.

Leacock, Stephen. Literary Lapses. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1957.

McCall Smith, Alexander. The Full Cupboard of Life: More from the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2005.

———. The Kalahari Typing School for Men. No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002.

O’Dell, Scott. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Newbery Medal Winner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.  (reread)

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2021. (Audiobook)

Rattigan, Terence. The Winslow Boy. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1946.

White, E. B. Stuart Little. New York: HarperCollins, 1973. (reread)

 Other Languages

Martínez, Santiago Carbonell. ΛΟΓΟΣ : ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΓΛΩΣΣΑ ΑΥΤΟΕΙΚΟΝΟΓΡΑΦΗΜΕΝΗ (Logos. Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata). Cultura Clásica, 2023.

Meyer, Erika. Ein Briefwechsel. German Graded Readers Alternate Series Book 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954. (I wish I had more of these to keep my rusty German on life support.)

 Self-Help, etc.

Bain, Ken. What the Best College Students Do. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012.

Good ideas; condescending tone. The attempt to package research on learning as stories about exemplary learners seemed forced.

Brooks, David. How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. New York: Random House, 2023. (Audiobook)

Comer, John Mark. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2019. (Audiobook)

Hurried through at 1.5+ speed.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press, 2024. (Audiobook)

Lang, James M. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. 1st edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2016. (Audiobook)

Miller, Neil. Agents of Healing: Learning To Do What Jesus Did. North York, Ontario: Swordfish Publishing, 2024.

Newport, Cal. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. New York, NY: Portfolio, 2024. (Audiobook)

            Hurried through at 2x speed.

Noble, Alan. On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living. Westmont: IVP, 2023. (Audiobook)

Volf, Miroslav. The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2025. (Audiobook)

Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2017. (Audiobook)

 For previous Reading Retrospectives, see this post and follow the links back.

Baby Steps: On Reading through the Bible in Hebrew and Greek

I first read through the Torah in Hebrew in 2001 (or thereabouts) thanks to my affiliation with the Bat Qol Institute and its encouragement for Christians to follow the Jewish annual Torah reading cycle known as Parashat ha-shavua. I re-read the Torah in Hebrew around the time I started teaching Hebrew (2013). The Greek Isaiah in a Year Facebook group provided a schedule and the incentive to tackle Isaiah in both Hebrew and Greek (2014), followed by Psalms (2015) and Job (2016). 

From there I made my way through the major prophets Ezekiel (2017) and Jeremiah (2018). Reading Daniel (2018) required taking another swing at Aramaic, so I turned next to Ezra, with its Aramaic sections, and Nehemiah (2019). That left the Pentateuch (in Greek), the Former Prophets, the remainder of the Writings (including Proverbs), and the Minor Prophets. 

Progress was slow over the next several years. I found I could make some headway during summers, but not during the school year when my day-job as a NT professor became all-consuming. To make a long story short, I finally completed a reading of the entire Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek in June, almost 25 years after I began.

If there is a lesson here, it is the value of making a schedule and keeping to it. One of the great joys of last semester’s sabbatical was the chapter-a-day reading rhythm that, like a Duolingo streak, became a habit I didn’t want to break, and in due course brought me over the finish line.

I suspect reading the entire Bible in Hebrew or Greek is less common than it ought to be, even for those of us who teach the languages. But that doesn’t make it more than a baby step. I am well-aware that reading through texts just once is not the best way to build fluency or to retain new vocabulary. And I am nowhere near as literate or versed in Scripture (in any language) as I should be.

Consider John, a fourth-century Christian martyr, who, Eusebius says, 

“ ... had written whole books of the Divine Scriptures, ‘not in tables of stone’ as the divine apostle says, neither on skins of animals, nor on paper which moths and time destroy, but truly ‘in fleshy tables of the heart,’ in a transparent soul and most pure eye of the mind, so that whenever he wished he could repeat, as if from a treasury of words, any portion of the Scripture, whether in the law, or the prophets, or the historical books, or the gospels, or the writings of the apostles. I confess that I was astonished when I first saw the man as he was standing in the midst of a large congregation and repeating portions of the Divine Scripture. While I only heard his voice, I thought that, according to the custom in the meetings, he was reading. But when I came near and perceived what he was doing, and observed all the others standing around him with sound eyes while he was using only the eyes of his mind, and yet was speaking naturally like some prophet, and far excelling those who were sound in body, it was impossible for me not to glorify God and wonder. - Eusebius, “Martyrs of Palestine” ch. 13.6-8

In Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Richard Hays asked:

“What would it mean to undertake the task of reading Scripture along with the Evangelists? First of all, it would mean cultivating a deep knowledge of the Old Testament texts, getting these texts into our blood and bones. It would mean learning the texts by heart in the fullest sense. The pervasive, complex, and multivalent uses of Scripture that we find in the Gospels could arise only in and for a community immersed in scriptural language and imagery. ... But alas, many Christian communities have lost touch with the sort of deep primary knowledge of Scripture—especially Israel’s Scripture—that would enable them even to perceive the messages conveyed by the Evangelists’ biblical allusions and echoes, let alone to employ Scripture with comparable facility in their own preaching and renarration of the gospel story.” - Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 357

So I celebrate baby steps, knowing that “the days of the years of my life ... have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.” (Gen 47:9 KJV)

A Whole Canadian

Some 40 years ago I announced to an auditorium full of students at the American missionary boarding school I was attending that “I am a whole Canadian!” Unlike my three older siblings, who were born in Somalia and carried US passports, I was born in Canada not far from where our Canadian father was raised, and I traveled under a Canadian passport. 

Only later did I learn that US citizenship could not be so easily avoided. Because my American mother spent the first eighteen years of her life in the state of Oregon, I inherited US citizenship automatically. Like it or not I am a dual citizen. I brandish my US passport when I need to enter the United States, and I file US taxes as required by US law, but my political allegiance remains the same as it was for that 10-year-old boy: I am a whole Canadian. 

And so it is with considerable dismay that I watch the US president threaten a (now postponed) trade war intended to wreak havoc on his country’s closest ally under the false pretext of enhancing border security and the false claim of a trade deficit, but with the apparently serious aim of annexing Canada (!).

• On enhancing border security as a pretext: The amount of Fentanyl passing through the Canadian border into the US is a tiny percentage of the total. Trump will not say what changes have to be made for the threat of tariffs to be lifted: “Figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) show the agency [seized 19.5 kilograms](https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/drug-seizure-statistics) of fentanyl at the northern border last year, compared to 9,570 kilograms at the southwestern one.” (Source)
• On a so-called trade deficit: “Trump is fixated on the Canada-U.S. trade deficit, which is largely driven by American demand for cheaper Canadian oil. When oil exports are excluded, the Americans actually have a trade surplus with Canada, according to Canadian government data.” (Source)
• On the economic impact of 25% tariffs: “The Canadian economy is set to face the most severe shock since the COVID-19 pandemic and will probably sink into a recession if a tariff war persists, say top economists.” (Source) 
• On Trump’s desire to make Canada the 51st state: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6633776

It occurs to me that Trump’s bullying might stem from genuine ignorance as well as malice. He may not realize that Canadian identity has historically been formed by its opposition to the United States. Why wouldn’t Canadians want to join the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? An answer from someone who has lived in both countries, as well as Africa, Europe and the Middle East: Let me count the ways. 

There is precedent for Trump’s behaviour—none of it good: In 1866 “a bill to annex Canada was introduced in the U.S. Congress” (Source). Thanks to the aftermath of the American civil war, it never came to a vote. No coincidence that Canadian confederation occurred one year later, in 1867. More recent precedent includes Germany’s annexation of of German-speaking Austria in 1938, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To my American friends: This isn’t right. Please say something, at least in prayer.

As a Christian, Trump’s threats to my own nation prompt a different sort of reflection:

• What does it mean to love my enemy? 
• What does it mean to affirm that my primary political allegiance is to the one who is “Lord of all” (Acts 10:36; see Phil 3:20)?
• I’ll be honest here: Evangelical American support for first-term Trump was a faith-shaking sucker punch to the gut. What does it say about the Truth I affirm when so many who profess it are so quick to believe lies? How can those who claim to be concerned with character and morality follow someone who cares not a wit for either of these things? … What, then, does it mean for me to treat my misguided co-religionists as brothers and sisters?

Now, where was I?

I submitted grades for my fourth and final fall semester course on December 31, just before year’s end and the start of a six-month sabbatical. Dreams of a research trip to Israel have given way to an “undisclosed location” closer to home:

Academic sabbaticals are more about uninterrupted research time than they are about rest, and I actually expect to get more writing done without the disruption that travel brings. I do look forward to being free of meetings, marking, and administrative responsibilities for the next several months, and I dearly hope finally to be able to see through to publication a few of the essays I have drafted over the last few years—beginning with the paper on Josephus's ethnonyms that I shelved at the start of the fall semester. 

Other goals include finally completing a reading of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek—just Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations, and part of the minor prophets to go!—making my way through some of the major books in Biblical Studies that I have purchased and not read; and, yes, some rest and time with family.

I hope to avoid the curriculum the Mock Turtle lays out in Alice in Wonderland, though parts of it seem all too familiar: 

“Reeling and Writhing ... to begin with ... and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

A 2024 Reading Retrospective

I logged 36 completed books in 2024, my highest tally in six years of Reading Retrospectives. Sixteen of them were audiobooks—also a record—and I counted Sandra Boynton’s hilarious introduction to chocolate, which is perhaps cheating. Why so many audiobooks? A few (overlapping) reasons:

1. I wasn’t putting as much listening time into Greek and Hebrew;
2. I managed to be more active for part of the year;
3. I seldom sit down just to read books anymore. In fact, I now look for an audio version even for books in my field because I am more likely to get through them that way. When I sit (or stand) at my desk, I am typically preparing for class, grading assignments, trying (when school is not in session) to write something more substantial, or wasting time on blog posts like this. Or I am on a device reading blogs, scanning the news, doom scrolling on the site formerly known as Twitter, window shopping for a new fountain pen—God knows there are enough needless distractions in my life. Maybe that will change this year.

Reading Highlight: Because it is not available as an audiobook, I asked for and received Peter Brown’s massive intellectual autobiography, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press, 2023) for Christmas in 2023. The book’s 99 short chapters were my bedtime reading for the first six months of the year. Perhaps because I do not aspire to be Peter Brown, I found his account of his life in Sudan, Ireland, Oxford, Berkeley and Princeton, his travels in Iran and Afghanistan, and his language learning completely fascinating. One of several ways it expanded my intellectual horizons was to help shift my mental map of the ancient world: Instead of locating Judaea on the periphery of the Roman empire, I now place it in the center, with the Mediterranean on one side and the Parthian empire beyond the Euphrates on the other. That, I find, changes everything. It also resulted in a new map of the Middle East—another present—that now adorns my office wall.

As usual, here is my lightly annotated list, organized this time by broad category (Biblical Studies, Biographies / Memoirs, Other Non-Fiction, and Fiction):

Biblical Studies

Adler, Yonatan. The Origins of Judaism An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal. AYBRL. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 

[Good evidence, but the argument didn’t quite live up to its billing, imo]

Avioz, Michael. Legal Exegesis of Scripture in the Works of Josephus. LSTS 97. London: T&T Clark, 2021. [Book review here]

Bauckham, Richard. Jesus: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Brock, Brian, and Bernd Wannenwetsch. The Malady of the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 1. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016.

________. The Therapy of the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 2. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. 

[A genuinely fresh take on 1 Corinthians. Like its exemplar, Barth’s Römerbrief, this stimulating two-volume theological commentary is by turns insightful and unpersuasive.]

Cohen, Shaye. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014. [Textbook; re-read multiple times, still worth reading]

Finger, Reta Halteman, and George D. McClain. Creating a Scene in Corinth: A Simulation. Harrisonburg, Virginia: Herald Press, 2013. [A nice concept; but I won’t be using it again]

Hays, Richard B. First Corinthians. Interpretation. Louisville: John Knox, 1997. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Henze, Matthias, and Rodney A. Werline, eds. Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters. SBL Press, 2020. [A worthy successor to its 1986 predecessor]

Jipp, Joshua W. Reading Acts. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Levine, Amy-Jill. Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians. HarperOne, 2024. 

[Audiobook; Scot McKnight’s book of the year; effectively punctures multiple Christian misconceptions of Jesus’ Jewish context]

Oliver, Isaac W. Luke’s Jewish Eschatology: The National Restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 

Memoirs and Biographies

Boucher, David, and Teresa Smith, eds. R. G. Collingwood: An Autobiography and Other Writings: With Essays on Collingwood’s Life and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 

[Cheating a little: I re-read the autobiography in 2023, and finished the essays, which are long enough for a volume of their own, in 2024.]

Brown, Peter. Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

________. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 

[As my bedtime reading for the second half of the year, I turned from Brown’s autobiography to the biography of Augustine that launched Brown’s academic career; completed on December 30.]

Butterfield, Rosaria Champagne. Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey Into Christian Faith. Pittsburgh, Pa: Crown & Covenant, 2012. [Audiobook]

McCaulley, Esau. How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. New York: Convergent Books, 2023. [Audiobook]

Smith, James. On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019. [Audiobook]

Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2018. 

[Audiobook; I first heard about Tara Westover’s story while living in Cambridge; I met one of the characters in her story – a professor at Brigham Young University – in Washington, D.C. this spring.]

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel. 2d ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. [Audiobook; 1st published in English in 1960]

Other Non-Fiction

Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. 3d ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016. 

[Audiobook; see this post for the reasons why I think everyone college age and up should read it]

Boynton, Sandra. Chocolate: The Consuming Passion. Random House, 1992.

Cline, Eric H., and Glynnis Fawkes. 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 

[A mark of my intellectual seriousness: I read the ‘graphic novel’ version not the monograph.]

Horn, Dara. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. [Audiobook]

Lawler, Andrew. Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City. New York: Anchor, 2021. [Audiobook]

Payne, Leah. God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. [Audiobook]

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. [Audiobook]

Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Crossway, 2020. [Audiobook]

Watkin, Christopher. Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2022. [Audiobook]

Fiction

Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. 40th anniversary ed. Toronto: McClelland & Steward, 2004.

Schaefer, Jack. Shane. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954.

Smith, Alexander McCall. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. New York: Vintage, 1998. [Audiobook; the first three books in the series became this fall’s comfort reading]

________. Tears of the Giraffe. Anchor, 2000.

________. Morality for Beautiful Girls. Anchor, 2001. [Audiobook]

Wiesel, Elie. Dawn. Translated by Frances Frenaye. Hill and Wang, 1961. [Audiobook]

________. Day. Translated by Anne Borchardt. Hill and Wang, 1962. [Audiobook]

Helter Skelter Take 21

Hard to believe I am at the beginning of my 21st year on faculty at Briercrest College. This semester looks to be another doozy: four different courses plus a conference paper to write on a topic unrelated to anything I will be teaching this fall. And, alas, two summers on, I have not quite finished work on my response to Jason Staples's reading of Josephus. 

On the positive side, I've taught all four classes multiple times before, I'm grateful to get paid to study the Bible and to teach it to students who care about what they are learning … and I'm looking forward to a sabbatical in the winter semester. Bring it on!

Unlike two earlier beginning-of-semester posts from fifteen and sixteen years ago, the aspirational soundtrack for the semester is not U2's cover of the Beetle's song that lends this post its name, but this rather more tame ballad by Randy Stonehill: 

In other news ...

We arrived in the small college town we still call home on 14 July 2004, twenty years ago today.

Strunk & White and the Via Negativa

17. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. - William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (3rd ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1979).

If you take William Strunk’s injunction to “Omit needless words” and perfect it, the result is the complete silence I have been practicing on this blog over the last couple months. But the end of term is upon us. Once I am done marking up my students’ needless words, perhaps I will have room to add a few of my own.  

Good Friday Snow

A 2023 Reading Retrospective

Zotero tells me I read fewer books in 2023 than I did in 2022, but, for the record, there are a few big books on this year's list and more that are related to my academic and teaching interests. I count eight audiobooks, six novels (if you include Adrian Plass), three or four Greek readers and texts, a couple language-learning pedagogy-related books, ten or so books related to biblical studies and ancient Judaism, and, depending on how you slice them, 3-5 memoirs or autobiographies. 

Zotero also tells me how little reading, aside from student assignments and course textbooks, gets done when classes are in session. Grades submitted, I completed seven books in the delightful final week of 2023 to make up for the drought.

Without further ado, here is the list in reading sequence, with more annotations than usual:

Plass, Adrian. The Theatrical Tapes of Leonard Thynn. London: Marshall Pickering, 1989. [Re-read]

Plato. Apology. 

        [Always a win when I make it through one of Plato's dialogues in Greek]

Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2017. 

        [Mesmerizing novel that felt a little shallow in retrospect]

Wilcock, Penelope. The Hawk and the Dove. Eastbourne: Minstrel, 1990.

Thiessen, Matthew. Jesus and the Forces of Death. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020. 

        [My initial reaction: Really fine book. I’m not quite convinced about Thiessen's central thesis about Jesus, but it shows compellingly that Jesus was Torah-observant (according to the Gospels) and includes all sorts of helpful details about how the purity system was understood.]

Staples, Jason A. The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 

        [My initial comments here]

Rogers, Guy MacLean. For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66–74 CE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 

        [Audiobook for the main text, otherwise I would never have finished, print book for the footnotes; among other things, this massive book is a helpful counter to Mason's more minimalistic approach to Josephus]

Moberly, R. W. L. The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018.

Wyner, Gabriel. Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It. New York: Harmony, 2014. 

        [Audiobook, but I liked it enough to order the print version. Big idea: Use Anki.]

Eliot, George. Silas Marner. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1861. [Audiobook]

Collier, Winn. A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message. Colorado Springs, Colorado: WaterBrook, 2022. 

        [Audiobook; two thumbs up]

Balme, Maurice, Gilbert Lawall, Luigi Miraglia, and Tommaso Francesco Bórri. Athenaze: introduzione al greco antico. Parte II. 2nd ed. Montella, Avellino: Accademia Vivarium Novum, 2008. 

        [Re-read for the 2nd time. Also re-read a couple times this year: Athenaze vol. 1]

Kushner, Aviya. The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. 

        [Audiobook, but I liked it enough to order a paper copy]

Newbigin, Lesslie. Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. 

Henshaw, Florencia G., and Maris D. Hawkins. Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory Goes to the Classroom. Focus, 2022.

Linebaugh, Jonathan A. The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022. 

        [Really helpful for thinking about Romans]

Barclay, John M. G. Paul and the Power of Grace. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. 

        [A textbook; re-read, this time as an audiobook]

Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. When in Romans: An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel According to Paul. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016. 

        [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1847. 

        [Re-read for the first time in 24 or 25 years]

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1960. 

        [First read in high school 30+ years ago; takes the prize for best fiction]

Westerholm, Stephen. Romans: Text, Readers, and the History of Interpretation. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022. 

        [Chapter two is a must-read response to the "Paul within Judaism" school; the rest of the book is a slow burn: I confess to wondering why much of the early history of interpretation mattered--the ancients' concerns seemed so foreign to the text--but then it all clicked in the final few chapters.]

Simkovich, Malka Z. Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories That Shaped Early Judaism. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2018.

Bono. Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Random House Audio, 2022. 

        [Fabulous audiobook if you like U2; I listened to most of the book on 1x speed for the music and for Bono's narration.]

Joint Association of Classical Teachers. Reading Greek: Text and Vocabulary. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 

        [Most satisfying book to have completed: I purchased the first edition of this graded Classical Greek reader in the late 90's, but despite repeated attempts I never made it past the first few chapters. After working hard on classical Greek fluency over the last 5 years, most of the text is now accessible.] 

Thiessen, Matthew. A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. Baker Academic, 2023. 

        [Good title, great footnotes; pairs well with Westerholm's chapter two above.]

Collingwood, R. G. An Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1939. 

        [First read in 2007; more accessible than The Idea of History]

Moore, Russell D. Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. Sentinel, 2023.\

        [Audiobook; Moore calls out the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of Trump-supporting American Evangelicals, and proposes alternatives. Big idea: James Dobson was right: character matters. Perhaps because we are the same (!) age, I share Moore's sense of betrayal.]