Annual Summer Reading List

Each year around this time, through the Update, I offer ten titles - in no particular order – from the previous twelve months for your summer reading consideration, usually with an emphasis on cultural understanding.  Enjoy.

The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier by Tony Jones.  The “emergent church movement”:  whether you love it or hate it, feel attraction or fear, consider yourself “in the know” or feel bewildered – or all of the above – this may be the definitive work to date on all things “emergent” by one of its leading voices.  Jones, the national coordinator of Emergent Village and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, offers an in-depth view of this new “third way” of faith that attempts to stand between religious conservatism and religious liberalism. 

The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 by Jay Winik.  As you can tell from this year’s list, I was taken by the number of excellent histories that give insight into our present day through the lens of the past.  The author of April 1865, Winik’s accomplishment is his global analysis, linking a new United States, the imperial power of Russia, Islamic peoples preparing for war, and the French revolution.  As Winik argues, their seemingly individual fates were actually a singular and deeply interconnected moment in time that changed the world and continues to shape the one in which we live.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin.  Few would argue that the judicial system is one of the great epicenters of American culture.  Within the judicial system, the Supreme Court is the most important legal body in our country.  The Nine, referring to the Court’s nine members, explores an institution in transition as it adjusts to its new conservative majority and what it might hold for such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.  In what the New York Times called a “morbidly fascinating non-fiction eco-thriller,” Weisman explores humanity’s impact on the planet by asking us to envision our earth without us.  As the flyleaf to the book details, “Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence…how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones.  It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us.”  Beyond the sheer fascination Weisman’s exploration brings, the work raises profound issues related to humanity’s relationship with creation.