What I'm reading.

by Brian D. McLaren

Back in the '70s I was trudging through the planning phase of a master's thesis on Puritan devotional poetry, and I happened to catch lunch with someone who read me a quote from an unknown (to me) Southern writer: Walker Percy. With Percy, I embarked on one of the most rewarding reading adventures of my life--and eventually switched thesis topics. His novels--my favorites were The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming--stimulated my intellect and imagination, and his essays, especially those in The Message in the Bottle, were formative in my theology.

Along with Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis, other authors have been formative--perhaps re-formative would be a better word. Lesslie Newbigin's The Open Secret remains my favorite, though all his work is helpful. His missiological viewpoint on Christian faith has been seminal for the Gospel and Our Culture Network, Emergent, and many other networks. His reappraisal of the Reformed doctrine of election is revolutionary, brilliant, and, I believe, right.

Few authors write poetry, essays, novels, and short stories--and do all well. Fewer still do so with a keen spiritual sensitivity. Wendell Berry's Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community contains sparkling essays; A Timbered Choir brims with inspiring poetry.

What happens when you cross an intellectual interest in the historical Jesus with an evangelical heart? N.T. Wright. His three-volume magnum opus is a treasure, and it's leading to profound reappraisals about Jesus and Paul. Wright got me asking, "What is the gospel anyway?"--and helped me find new, and I believe far better, understandings.

Walter Brueggemann has helped me see the Bible in a post-critical, post-liberal, and post-fundamentalist light. Finally Comes the Poet and Texts Under Negotiation are favorites, along with Ichabod Toward Home.

Brian D. McLaren, pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland, is author of A Generous Orthodoxy.

Phyllis Tickle, one of the most respected authorities on religion publishing today, is the author of some two dozen books, most of them on religion.

By Kathleen Norris

I am savoring Karl Rahner's The Need and the Blessing of Prayer. It's densely packed, full of insight: "What can be taken from you is never God." For review, I'm reading Garret Keizer's new book, Help: The Original Human Dilemma. I'll never read the story of the Good Samaritan the same way again. Because I'm teaching a senior high Sunday school class, I'm reading Dorothy Bass and Don Richter's Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens. It's a lively, fresh look at what goes into developing a healthy spiritual life. The books that have been most significant in my own spiritual growth are the Bible, the letters of Emily Dickinson, and the sayings of the Desert Fathers.

Kathleen Norris is author of the best-selling books Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and The Cloister Walk.

By Philip Yancey

Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, by Antjie Krog. The author reported daily for South African radio on the two-year process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the nation's bold attempt at confronting its violent past without furthering a cycle of revenge and retribution. This award-winning book contains actual transcripts from the hearings, as well as Krog's personal reactions to the horror stories heard by the commission. Questions of forgiveness, justice, and reparations hover constantly overhead.

True Resurrection, by H. A. Williams. I found this book, a reprint from 30 years ago, stimulating and inspiring. Williams, for many years the dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, believes that Christ's resurrection involved far more than a body rising from a tomb. Resurrection power can bring life to dying marriages, dying dreams, as well as dying people. How is my life different because of Christ's resurrection? This book provokes that question in me, and suggests some answers.

Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage, by Meic Pearse, explores the clash of civilizations first described by Samuel Huntington. Why do Third World countries wink at bribes? Wily do they mistreat women? Why don't they welcome the ideal of tolerance so precious to the West? As one reviewer said, "This is no 'fundamentalist' altar-call harangue, however, but possibly the best, most intelligent, most humane brief argument that the West, rather than the Rest, needs reform." Someone should have given a copy to George W. Bush.

Morning Light: The Spiritual Journal of Jean Sulivan, by Jean Sulivan. A French priest who struggled to relate his faith to a secular and alien culture, Sulivan left this remarkable meditation on true spirituality. He's a subversive in the best sense of the word, and no one I've persuaded to read this book has ever regretted it.

Philip Yancey, editor at large for Christianity Today, is the author of numerous books, including Soul Survivor and Rumors of Another World.

By David James Duncan 

When I'm writing a novel I turn inward. To assist this turning, I don't so much read as reread work with which I've wrestled for years. In recent months I've reread much of Dante's The Divine Comedy--and realized yet again how much I prefer some of the people Dante condemns to limbo (Homer, Ovid, and Socrates, for starters) to Dante himself. Dante writes well when he waxes mystical, but when he waxes judgmental he writes dyspeptic Roman Catholic opera that I, for one, find about as "comedic" as a Republican op-ed or a stick in the eye.

I recently reread the poetry of two great Indian mystics, Tukaram and Shri Jnandev, both translated by Dilip Chitre, both tremendous. I reread Circling the Sacred Mountain, by Robert Thurman and Tad Wise, and will soon reread Thurman's translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

A character in my novel [in progress] is a Jungian analyst living on Manhattan's Upper West Side. To feed him I just visited New York City and took long walks on the Upper West Side, and on the plane going and coming read C.G. Jung Speaking, edited by William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull.

In this era of neoconservative balderdash, I'll close with a few lines of Jung's from the year 1934: "The most tremendous danger that man has to face is the power of his ideas. No cosmic power on earth ever destroyed 10 million [people] in four years. But man's psyche did it. And it can do it again....

"Mass infections are greater than man. [In times of such infections], turn the eye of consciousness within to see what is there.... [S]ee what [you] can do in small ways.... What lies beyond is newspaper mythology.... What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfill the divine will within me. This task gives me so much to do that I have no time for any other. Let me point out that if we were all to live in this way we would need no armies, no police, no diplomacy, no politics, no banks. We would have a meaningful life and not what we have now--madness."

David James Duncan is the author of The Brothers K and The River Why.

Elizabeth Maxwell has been associate rector of the Church of the Holy Apostles and program director of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen for 15 years.