Summer is rapidly coming to a close, and my prediction that I’d make it through maybe half and do some other, lighter reading came pretty close to true. So, here’s what I actually read from the list:

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Holy Conversations by Gil Rendle & Alice Mann

As it turns out, after a semester of really intense theological reading, it was difficult to force myself to do much academic reading. Instead, I rediscovered my love for literature, with a little bit of theology sprinkled in. I started to type out all the titles, but it began to feel like I was showing off how much leisure time I had. Here are some highlights: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, A Blueprint for Discipleship by Kevin Watson, The Fidelity of Betrayal by Peter Rollins, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman, and Jesus Christ for Today’s World by Jürgen Moltmann.

Of all of these, Diaz, Rollins, and Moltmann were the top three. Oscar Wao tells the story of a family of immigrants to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic, and Diaz weaved the history of the DR into the narrative in a way that was very informative, but still compelling. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

In September, I’m heading to Chicago for the Emergent Village Theological Conversation with Jürgen Moltmann with some friends (and lots of people I don’t know well or at all), so the Moltmann book was part of my conference prep.  I’m excited about getting to hear more from him and to catch up with friends whom I haven’t seen in a while.

Well friends, it’s final paper time at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and that means it’s a great time to distract myself with blogging. Inspired by Blake, I went through my shelves, put some up for sale, picked some that I’ve been meaning to read. After careful consideration, I came up with the following:

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Living on the Borders: What the Church Can Learn from Ethnic Immigrant Cultures by Mark Griffin and Theron Walker

The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations by Gil Rendle and Alice Mann

And, in case that isn’t enough, a little more light reading…

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

There will also be some Rumi sprinkled in. I think this may be overly ambitious. I’ll probably make it through about half, plus a few unlisted, lighter books.

What’s on your summer reading list?

Last week, Peter Rollins made an impromptu stop at Vanderbilt Divinity School that I was fortunate enough to attend. It wasn’t a scheduled speaking engagement or a part of his Lessons in Evandalism tour, just a talk given to a small group over lunch. I am familiar with Rollins’ work only from reading Blake’s and Kevin’s posts about him, but these left me intrigued. His talk was given in light of responses he’d received to his book How (Not) to Speak of God, which I have not read, so I think my hearing of his talk may have been lacking some important background information. Regardless, here is my take on his talk.

Rollins’ talk centered on the dissonance between our meta-narrative and our mega-narrative. I’m not familiar with the latter term, which he took from Westphal, but I understood it to be along the lines of the narrative of our lived  history. It’s the “big story.” To illustrate, he drew a simple table:

He said the center row is where he sees most of Christianity–ascribing belief to the meta-narrative, but professing doubt at the level of lived experience. Our lives profess belief in the free market, the military, our 401k, policital parties, etc. He advocated a move toward the third row–doubt at the meta level and belief at the mega level. He pointed to the experiences of Mother Theresa and Bonhoeffer. I’m not terribly familiar with Bonhoeffer’s life other than the hagiography, but after Mother Theresa’s long life of service for the Gospel, some of her writings came out confessing that she had not sensed the presence of God for many years. It is this kind of doubt-belief paradigm toward which we ought to move. He briefly described the belief-belief paradigm as a sort of fundamentalism and doubt-doubt as some kind of liberalism (he used a specific adjective here, but it escapes me).

He also discussed Ikon, the community he founded. He said that it was a community of theists and a/non-theists, the latter of whom, if asked, might respond that they did not believe in God, but they were at Ikon because, of course, God had spoken to them. The question, he said, is not whether God exists, but what God is saying.

A few other snippets and one liners (paraphrased):

• Batman fighting subjective violence by night placates Bruce Wayne’s conscience and allows him to perpetuate objective violence by day. Similarly, the church placates and allows us to continue participating in systems of violence.
• God is not anonymous, but hypernonymous.
• The Incarnation is not the revealing of God, but the mystery among us.
• Revelation is not new information, but bedazzlement, transformation, and concealment.
• Ikon offers the Omega Course–like the Alpha Course, but its opposite.

I found the talk to be intriguing, and I will certainly check out How (Not) to Speak of God and The Orthodox Heretic. My main question (which I should have asked, but didn’t) was why there was seemingly a necessary dissonance between the meta- and mega-narratives. Perhaps delving into Rollins’ work would answer that question, and I think Blake’s above-linked post gets at this question as well.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any experience with Rollins? Do you find him compelling? Heretical? Other? I’ll be interested to see where a conversation might lead.

With the internet granting a public voice to people who previously had no such voice, why not throw my own hat into the fray? I had my own website previously, which essentially evolved into a blog, but I didn’t know the proper terminology until a few years into it. Back then, I enjoyed playing with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but now I just like simple services which allow me to type in what I want to say. So, with this, my hat is cast into the ever expanding and perhaps never ending Blogosphere. This will be a place I can talk about life as a divinity student, a candid for ordained ministry, as well as broaching fun topics such as theology, ecclesiology, and whatever else pops up.

I’m not sure exactly how anyone will find this, but I’m going to go ahead and put a question out there–how do you backup your hard drive? My computer is about five years old, has had water spilled on it (don’t worry, jsut a little bit), and has had problems with overheating in the past, so I’m well aware that my hard drive is finite. I’ve considered buying an external hard drive, and my mother also had a tech shop recommend Mozy, which costs $4.95/month. I only have about 40 GB of data used on my Hard Drive. Anyone who has used either external or online storage, what would you recommend?

Lastly, because I think I’d like to try out this trackback thing, I’m going to link Blake Huggins’ latest post called, “What Do I Love When I Love My God?.” It’s pretty thought provoking. And I learned that Blake loves me. All you blogging pros, let me know if I slip into any blogging faux pas.