15 Books

I confess, I am often reticent to get into some of the many quizzes, contests, suggestions offered through Facebook. Which theologian do you most favor? What city would be your perfect home? What color should you wear when the moon is full? Which great looking star would you most like to play you in the movie of your life? Maybe I dislike that last question because I remember in college when people told me I reminded them of John Ritter (in his Three’s Company days). Now I fear Danny DeVito might come to mind.
Anyway, two friends (Lawrence and Jerad) invited me to share fifteen book titles under the following rules: “Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose.” I was intrigued. They got me. I posted my fifteen, with a little bending of the rules and tagged fifteen – o.k. sixteen – friends. Otherwise I kept it brief. Here is the list with explanatory notes.

1. The Bible: How can I say anything else, except this is not simply a nod to profession or piety. Among the first books I remember reading and loving were: Homer Price (and I still have my copy somewhere), Winners Never Quit (a portrait of various athletes who had hit hard times and came back) and The Greatest in Baseball. Love of books and reading came early to me, I guess, and there are certain feeling tones inside even as I type these titles. I came to the Bible most fervently after a born again experience. I asked for a copy of The Way (Living Bible) for my fourteenth birthday. I read the Bible straight through, struggling along the way. There are times when reading the Bible remains a struggle, but other times the words leap from the page into my life. Reading this book shapes the life from which I read. I should also admit that all my other reading shapes how I come back to this book again and again.
2. Writings and Drawings, Bob Dylan. As sometimes happens, a born again experience starts one on a journey that may lead away from the initial theological understandings with which one understood the experience. I remember hearing someone in my Jesus People group telling another person that they should probably not bother reading some certain book, and I remember cringing inside. What was outside this particular understanding of Christian faith? In some ways I think the same Spirit that gave me new birth urged me to think more deeply and broadly. I left that group and began asking all kinds of questions. I had sung a couple of Bob Dylan songs in a Christian small group and liked them. What more was there to this interesting guy with the remarkably distinct voice and gift for putting words together? I bought Greatest Hits I and II. I found Writings and Drawings in the Duluth East High School library. Hey Mr. Tambourine man play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to. Hey Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me in the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you. And I did.
3. Toward a Psychology of Being, Abraham Maslow. Senior year at East psychology class and I met Abraham Maslow (not literally). Many people know about his hierarchy of needs, but don’t get beyond that. That theory has some validity, but can also be criticized, and rightly so. But the Maslow I met in this book wanted to get beyond thinking simply about self-actualization to considering the transcendent and transpersonal. He wanted, as well, to develop a psychology of evil “one written out of compassion and love for human nature.” I deeply appreciated Maslow’s breadth and depth of learning and his gentle spirit, at least as those came through his writing.
4. Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, Alan Watts. As I sought to discover a wider world outside my intense born-again Christian faith, I wanted to learn something about other religious traditions. Alan Watts was my first guide. This book of essays is not as well known as some of his other works, but it provides a nice selection of some of his later writings. I enjoy the title, too.
5. On the Road, Jack Kerouac; Howl, Allen Ginsberg. At a used bookstore in downtown Duluth I bought a copy of Theodore Roszak’s The Making of A Counter Culture and made the connection between Alan Watts and the beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In a college English class on twentieth century American literature, just before we were to read some beat literature, the professor asked if anyone had read Kerouac or Ginsberg. My hand was among the two or three that was raised. I still appreciate the rush of language in these works. They were important beginning points into poetry and literature.
6. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein. The summer I graduated from college and had no reading assignments or papers to think about, I picked up Tolkein’s trilogy (actually began with The Silmarillion and The Hobbit) and spent a summer escaping when I could into another world. It was magic.
7. Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich. Christian faith never left me, or one might better say the God of Jesus Christ kept after me, and following college I went to seminary to explore this faith that had been so intense, but had, at times come up intellectually short. Why could I not let this go? Why did it not let me go? Tillich was the first theologian I grappled with in seminary and his work remains worth the effort. His definition of sanctification (life under the impact of the Spiritual Presence) as increasing awareness, increasing freedom, increasing relatedness, and increasing transcendence captured my attention and imagination then, and it still does.
8. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr. During college I began to become more socially aware and politically active. The Christian faith I knew at that time was not terribly socially aware. In seminary, reading Niebuhr, I discovered that faith not only helped answer existential questions, but pushed one into thinking about human social relations, too. There have been at least two or three times since seminary that I have come across articles about “needing Niebuhr” again. I am glad I found him in seminary and have never let him go.
9. Process Theology: an introductory exposition, John Cobb and David Griffin. Tillich and Niebuhr remain rich theological resources for my life and thought, but the most profound discovery in theology in my seminary years was the discovery of process theology. It categories of thought profoundly shape how I think about life, God, Jesus, the Bible - - - God as Creative-Responsive love, power as influence, relatedness as essential to experience.
10. Struggle and Fulfillment, Donald Evans. This book by a relatively little-known religious scholar and ethicist weaves together psychoanalytic psychology, theology, philosophy, ethics and religious studies. Who could ask for anything more?
11. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman; Poems, Emily Dickinson. How different can two poets be - - - Whitman sounding his barbaric “yawp” and Dickinson asking “are you nobody, too?” Yet both poets touch something deep within. Perhaps within we find both multitudes and singleness, a need to celebrate life and confront death. Perhaps the poets are united in their sense of “divine madness.” One of the first Dickinson poems I remember reading I read on a small paper bag given me by Savran’s Paperback store in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis. “Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye.”
12. The Centaur, John Updike. I began reading Updike when I returned to school to work on my Ph.D. While that work left insufficient time for outside reading, somewhere along the line this book fell into my hands. I appreciate Updike’s language and story-telling. This work weaves myth into the world of a father and a son in Pennsylvania. The best literature expands our ability to experience our experience and Updike helps me do that.
13. Love’s Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum. This was one of the first books of philosophy I read after completing my Ph.D. I had returned to parish ministry so didn’t really need to be reading this kind of work, but something in me is fed by it. Nussbaum writes beautifully, insightfully and intelligently about literature, feeling, ethics and life. This book led me to develop a love for Henry James, as Nussbaum used his work in making a case for a life that is to be lived finely aware and richly responsible.
14. The Dhammapada. In 2006 I read Marjorie Suchocki’s book on religions Divinity and Diversity. In one chapter where she was discussing Buddhism, I realized that it had been a long time since I had read much literature from this tradition, especially non-Zen literature. I am not sure why I felt it might be helpful to explore this tradition more thoroughly, but I began to read. The Dhammapada is filled with insight, insight that I find helpful in developing my own Christian faith and practice.
15. The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker. Last summer I decided to read this book I had owned since college. After being a candidate for bishop and not getting elected, I think I wanted to read something that would engage me deeply, that might cause me to think in some new ways. I had heard some remarkable things about this book, and so I read it. It engaged me deeply heart, mind and soul and I continue to ponder its insights into the human situation. I love how Becker uses insights from the psychoanalytic tradition. I appreciate his finding kinship with Tillich and Niebuhr. Passages in this book sing, though the tune is often haunting. Becker died while the book was moving toward publication.