Get Chesterton’s Orthodoxy Free (with a new Introduction by…Me)

How do you sell a book when you’ve a smallish audience, no real “name recognition,” and you want to avoid spamming folks with desperate pleas to, you know, buy the book? (See what I did there?)

That’s the question I’ve been puzzling over the past few months. And it’s a question that I posed to my publisher, too, who has been really gracious with my idiosyncratic ways.

In fact, a few months back they came up with an idea that I am really excited about: sell someone else’s book. Or rather, give it away for free.

G.K. Chesterton (Photo credit: giveawayboy)

That’s right. Moody has repackaged their version of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and I’ve added an introduction to it that explains why I think everyone should read it. It’s a fun little introduction, with opinions about the book that I’ve never said anywhere before. But the whole point of an introduction is to have a reason to carry on through the book itself, and in this I think it will be successful. The timing is good, too. If you get a copy you should read it along with my skeptical friend David Sessions, who is giving it a critical once-over during the next few weeks. I am sure he would appreciate the dialogue.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s an excerpt from The End of our Exploring in it as well? That’s in it, too. It’s a bit cheeky, I realize, putting my words next to Chesterton’s. But I’m sure he’ll come out all right in the comparison.

Orthodoxy is on Amazon right now, where your review would be helpful. And it will be on Google Play and Barnes and Noble at some point, too.

Of course, none of this really works unless people spread the word. If you’re on one of those social networks and want your friends to read a book I’ve affectionately dubbed the most important work of the twenty-first century, even though it was written in the twentieth, you know (I imagine) what to do. And if you haven’t read it, I can promise that it will make both entertaining and instructive summer reading.

Get a Free Copy of The End of our Exploring

My next book releases the first week of July and I’m starting to get really excited about it finally reaching the public.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll be hearing a bit more about the project and about how we plan on getting the word out about it. I’ll simply say that if a few of the ideas come together it’s going to be, well, awesome.

But before we get there, we want to give the book away to people who are willing to read it and provide honest reviews on both Goodreads and Amazon. The emphasis here is on honest, as without the truth what do we have?

If you’re interested in receiving an advance copy of the book in exchange for said reviews, please send your name and mailing address to moodycollective@gmail.com. The good folks at Moody are handling that process, which is very kind of them. I am told the first twenty five who contact them will receive copies.

Thanks for your interest in the project and for your support through the years. This is going to be a whole lot of fun.

On substitutionary atonement and disgraced politicians

Why do disgraced, scandal-plagued politicians like Mark Sanford keep making comebacks?

In one of the great skewerings of both the Washington political establishment and modern language, George Carlin destroyed politicians–here you should think of Mark Sanford and Anthony Weiner–who are caught in a major scandal, but don’t see why that should disqualify them from future “public service.”

“And we know [he must be guilty] because the next thing we hear from him is, ‘I just want to put this thing behind me and get on with my life.’ That’s an expression we hear a lot these days from people in all walks of life. Usually the person in question has committed some unspeakable act: ‘Yes, it’s true that I strangled my wife, shot the triplets, set fire to the house, and sold my young son to an old man on the train… but now I just want to put this thing behind me and get on with my life.’ That’s the problem in this country… too many people getting on with their lives. I think what we really need more of is ritual suicide. Never mind the big press conferences, get the big knife out of the drawer.”

It’s hard not to consider Carlin’s now decade old remarks given the ubiquity of the second chance politician in the contemporary United States. Recently the shameless adulterer Mark Sanford was reelected by a cowardly batch of South Carolina Republicans who sold their morals for a seat in the House. More recent still, the disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner who famously sent pictures of his genitals to multiple young women is looking a strong candidate for mayor of our nation’s largest city. We can also mention David Petraeus, who recovered from an ongoing affair with his biographer to rise to a top position at a major Wall Street investment firm. And there’s also the disgraced former New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer, who both plagiarized and fabricated quotations in a recent book and is now, only a year later, shopping a new book to publishers. Continue reading →

A Few Words on The End of Our Exploring

As you may know, my next book, The End of our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith, arrives on store shelves the first week of July.

Though I haven’t said much about the project to this point, I’m thrilled and somewhat nervous to have it out in the reading public. I think it’s better written than my last one, more accessible, and–well, it’s on a subject that I am deeply committed to and have been for the past fifteen years of my life.

When I set out to write it, I placed on myself what appears in retrospect to be an unreasonable challenge: I wanted the book to be so well written, so well done, that it would “sell itself.” My inner logic was that if the words themselves didn’t move people to tell others, then no marketing technique or “platform” could save them. And even more damningly, such words wouldn’t be worth saving. I wanted the words themselves to be of the sort that might endure to eternal life and the process of writing to be an act of faith, a sign between me and God of my faith in him and in the calling I had once discerned to say things in public.

None of that was particularly reasonable, as my writer-friends reminded me. We should eat, drink, be merry, and let the words flow as they come to us while we tarry beneath the shadow of death. An obsession over creating words that endure can be just as much a denial of sovereignty as entrusting ourselves to the power of savvy marketing. And the actual book itself destroyed any pretentions of greatness: it is a better book than my last one, of that I have no doubt. And some of the people who have read it have told me that they found it personally helpful, a commendation that I take to heart. But if you want great prose, well, there are better bits in Lewis’s diaries before he became a Christian then there are in nearly any living writers‘. We shan’t see the likes of him for a long, long time.

Words, of course, have never sold themselves. That is a romanticized fiction, necessary perhaps to motivate the act of writing, but impossible when actually facing the release of a book. Writers need help. We need people to tell others about our words and commend them. We need gratitude for those who do read, and the courage to ask those we admire to read them as well. We need the people we write for to care enough about the words to pass them along to others, which means the words must be worth caring about.

Finding those people, though, and helping those people find the book is fraught with danger, as doing anything at all will be. The possibility for writers turning into narcisstistic monsters obsessed with sales opportunities is one that is well-known, as is the reduction of the author-reader relationship into the author-centric concepts of “tribes” and “platforms.” Authors have even been known to turn to a trumped up controversy: Dorothy Sayers once anonymously skewered her own book in order to generate interest in it, a strategy that I have been sometimes tempted to undertake.

Against this: faith and works, lots of hard work, and talking with people and writing and trying to explain what I meant and didn’t mean, and lots of saying “thanks.” I live now on gratitude and celebration for a work that is (finally!) coming into light. That gratitude can not only be extended toward those who helped the production happen, but those who will risk their money to buy it, especially those who will make that risk without a long list of Amazon reviews to guide their way. That gratitude extends toward those early readers of Mere-O, some of whom are with us still. That gratitude extends to a publisher who, despite my last book not exactly being a blockbuster still decided to take a chance.

And the celebration, that too should happen. I am glad this book has made it. I plan on throwing myself a party, to which I would invite you if we lived in the same country, but seeing as we don’t I’ll keep it a private affair. For the moment, though, I will extend my joy as I have always done around the internet world: by pointing you to a few words I wrote elsewhere on a question that matters.

Home: An Essay on The Little Way of Ruthie Leming

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot

Home. It’s a mythic notion. Two of the three great epics of the Greco-Roman world trade explicitly in its associations. Odysseus and Aeneas each journey homeward – the former back toward the home he left that yet remains, although not unchanged; the latter, his home destroyed, moves forward toward a home yet to be found. The Odyssey, then, is a story about those who have a home to go back to, and the Aeneid is a story for those who long for home but have no place that answers to the name.

And then there is the story of Cain in the book of Genesis. After Cain murdered his brother, he was condemned to be a wanderer, forever alienated from God and family. His plight presents itself as an allegory of the human condition. But then there was a twist. Cain, we are told, went on to build a city, he would not be a wanderer after all; and his descendants are reckoned the founders of agriculture, metallurgy, and the arts – in short, of human civilization. Out of the dissatisfactions of homelessness, we are led to conclude, flowed the great achievements of human culture. But the narrator has the last word. He tells us that Cain built his city in the land of Nod, a name that echoes the Hebrew word for wandering. It is a touch of literary artistry which poignantly suggests that, even when it is surrounded by the accouterments of civilization, the human soul wanders lost and alienated … homeless.

Reflections on the theme of home and homelessness are not the preoccupation of ancient writers alone. They persist because the condition with which they wrestle persists. Rod Dreher’s The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, recently reviewed in these pages by Michael Reneau, admirably takes its place within this ancient literary tradition.

The book tells the story of Dreher’s alienation from his family and hometown, his sister’s battle with lung cancer, the love of the small town that rallied around his sister and her family, and, finally, Dreher’s homecoming. It is a moving book, but it is not sentimental. It praises the virtues of community without being blind to its vices. It raises all sorts of terribly important questions – about place, identity, ambition, love, family, and more – that we should all consider with great seriousness. It deserves to be read widely, and I hope that it will be. And I hope that it generates conversation, discussion, and debate about the assumptions that order our lives.

My Home and Homelessness

Little Way led me to think again about my own identity. Continue reading →

Catching Up With Time in the “Before” and “Up” Films

A professor I admire once said — while discussing the films of Yasujiro Ozu, or maybe it was semiotics (can’t remember) — that watching the sun set can be both a thing of incredible beauty and deep sadness, often simultaneously. I thought of this as I watched Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, which includes a scene of a couple sitting by the sea in Greece, watching the sun slowly dip below the horizon. It’s there, there, there — and then it’s not there. A fleeting flare of arresting orange. Present and then absent. Perhaps the beauty and sadness of a sunset has to do with the fact that it’s the process in nature we humans most identify with. Ours is a context of ephemerality.

Midnight just released in theaters, and it is certainly one of the best films of 2013 so far. But before you see it, be sure to watch the two preceding films in Linklater’s Before series: Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). Together they comprise a trilogy that is one of the most understated and elegant in the history of cinema.

Linklater’s films follow the love story between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) as it plays out in more or less real time in one Vienna night in 1994 (Before Sunrise), a sunset stroll in 2003 Paris (Before Sunset), and an evening jaunt in Greece in 2012 (Midnight). The films let us peek in on these two lives every nine years, witnessing only as much of their “present” as the 90-100 minutes of movie watching allows us to see. The glimpses we get into this couple’s journey together are snapshots not just of their particular world — compellingly characterized by highbrow garrulity, philosophizing and Gen X angst — but of humanity in general: how we age, how we love, how we fight and how we dream.

Similar in many ways to what Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are exploring in the Before series is what Michael Apted has done and is doing with the astonishing Up series. Beginning in 1964 as a British television documentary examining the lives of fourteen 7-year-old children representing a diverse array of socioeconomic positions in 1960s Britain, the Up series has followed its real-life characters every seven years since. 14 Up (1970) checked in on the children at age 14; 21 Up (1977) updated audiences on their lives as they each turned 21; and so on. 56 Up just came out a few months ago and is now available to watch on Netflix, as are all of the other Up films.

In his review of 56 Up, the late Roger Ebert — who once called the Up series “the noblest project in cinema history” — wrote this: “It is a mystery, this business of life. I can’t think of any other cinematic undertaking that allows us to realize that more deeply.”

Indeed, I think that one of the great potentials of cinema — particularly when it is used in the way Linklater and Apted are using it in their respective series — is that it can capture some of the idiosyncrasies and mysteries of the “business of life” that we might otherwise fail to see (presumably because we are too busy wading through our own “business of life”). Things like the peculiar experience of the passage of time: simultaneously the most obvious and yet ungraspable mystery of existence.

The Before series is about love and relationships on one level, to be sure. But the real subject of these films is time, and the frequency with which it is discussed by the characters in the films hammers home that point.

“O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time,” says Jesse (Hawke) in Before Sunrise, quoting Dylan Thomas quoting W.H. Auden. At other times Jesse waxes philosophical about how surreal it is to self-consciously observe himself living in real time, or Celine shares about how she always feels like her life is either a dream of the future or a memory of the past. Meanwhile, the couple walks and talks in (more or less) real time, as the sun — that most vivid of all reminders of temporality — either rises, sets, or cedes its position to the moon. As Hawke said earlier this year when Midnight premiered at Sundance, the star of the Before series “is not Julie or [Hawke] but Father Time himself.”

The Up series is far less meta in its treatment of time; yet like the Before films, Father Time is a palpable presence in every frame. There’s something compelling about observing the passage of time — 56 years, in this case — as it molds, batters, refines and weathers these people on each of their wildly divergent paths. Some of the original fourteen children grew up to be very successful; others not so much. Most started families and now have kids, grandkids, stepkids, and exes. Some (but not all) exceeded the expectations of the social class into which they were born. Some are happier than others (from what we can tell in our peeks inside, at least), and the only thing they all have in common is that none, not a one, has conquered time. They are all aging, and with every passing Up film we feel the weight of this ever more.

Cinema is unique among mediums in its ability to “sculpt in time,” as Andrey Tarkovsky wrote. It’s all about compressing, elongating, speeding up, and editing time to tell a story (that may span millennia or minutes) in the span of just a few hours. But Before and Up are especially compelling because rather than focusing on the filmmaker’s power over time, they focus on time’s power over us. Linklater tries his best to tell each Before film in real time, avoiding cinema’s manipulative power and instead foregrounding the somewhat eerie feeling of just sitting with time as it unfolds.

The Up films leverage cinema’s ability to compress time by including footage from the previous entries in each present portrait. What we get is essentially a moving-image scrapbook of each of these peoples’ 56-years, summarized in about ten minutes each. Watching it evokes the emotions of looking through an old box of photos and reliving an entire past in one quick burst of nostalgia. It confronts us with the expansiveness of what has come before; which seems large to us because our memories are painfully small and cannot hold every special moment we’ve had or beautiful thing we’ve seen, let alone the histories of other lives and lands.

Unless we have cameras there to capture every moment, our pasts are just as inaccessible to us as our futures. Memories, photos, tales of old can only reconstruct former glories up to a point (for a smart take on all this as it relates to “documenting” one’s past, see Sarah Polley’s amazing new film, Stories We Tell). And yet it could be argued that the “present” is the most elusive of all. For in reality, what we think of as the present is really just our brain processing things in the past — even if just a millisecond ago. Time is most relentless in the present because try as we might to slow it down or speed it up, it only goes by its own pace. The past and future are more malleable categories because they exist entirely in our minds, where we can elongate, embellish, or edit our recollection or vision of an experience, to our liking.

Tarkovsky puts it well in this excerpt from Sculpting In Time:

“Time is said to be irreversible. And this is true enough in the sense that ‘you can’t bring back the past’. But what exactly is this ‘past’? Is it what has passed? And what does ‘passed’ mean for a person when for each of us the past is the bearer of all that is constant in the reality of the present, of each current moment? In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight only in its recollection.”

The Before and Up films are powerful because they embody the “sand between the fingers” brevity of the present: reminding us that even the most magical moments in life are fleeting, that our “when I grow up” dreams will be here and gone before we know it, and that as a result it makes little sense to live in search of a permanent state of pleasure or satisfaction. Such a thing would be, as Solomon might say, like “chasing after the wind.” Our hearts will be restless, said Augustine, until they rest in Thee. And perhaps that is “Father” Time’s greatest gift to us: stirring up a restlessness in our souls that directs our longing to something Other, unfathomably infinite and unbound by time.

The Vocation of Writing when Words are Cheap (and other things)

Last week while out at Biola, I gave a short talk on the vocation of writing when words are cheap. It was a strange talk for me, as I actually wrote it out in full on the plane over and then read through it.

There are a few asides and a few hiccups in the delivery due to the new process and because I hadn’t the time to reread the talk several times before giving it, but given the interest I received beforehand I thought I’d put it out here all the same. I’ll be revising the text at some point soon and will post it in the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and for those who are interested, I read through a bit of The End of Our Exploring, too. The book releases July 1st and pre-orders are now being taken by Amazon and others.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Review

Ruthie Leming lived in a little way. While her older brother left their rural Louisiana hometown to chase a big city journalism career, Ruthie stayed, married her high school sweetheart, became a teacher at the local school, and raised her three daughters a stone’s throw from her childhood home. When terminal cancer took hold of her, her brother watched as the town did its best to fill the void of the sick, faithful mother and wife, then cried with them at her graveside. It was the little way of life that drew her big brother back home to Louisiana.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life is a memoir, biography, and meditation all rolled up in one. Rod Dreher traces the divergent paths he and his little sister took in life, from their different experiences as children and adolescents, to their very different lives as adults. Ruthie’s cancer diagnosis rocked the Dreher/Leming clan and whole St. Francisville community, including the many students whose paths she had altered. Dreher chronicles how Ruthie, her family, and community coped during her last days and eventual death. But he also lays bare his attempts to reconcile with his sister and father, who always resented his Francophile tastes and big-city exodus. Dreher’s return alone couldn’t fix the wounded relationships in the family. And it’s in that realization after Ruthie’s death where Dreher does some of his most poignant storytelling.

Little Way shows how exhausting it can be to understand even our own families and why building and sustaining meaningful relationships will always be lifelong work. Dreher’s struggle with his sister and father, and even with Ruthie’s oldest daughter, show how bitterly we fight and how elusive reconciliation can be. In the last chapter, during a trip in which Dreher treated Ruthie’s oldest daughter with a trip to France, she nearly leveled him with the revelation about her deceased mother: Ruthie had never approved of Dreher’s moving or his career and, worse, his attempts to grow closer to his nieces would likely be in vain because of Ruthie’s opinion lingering in her daughters’ minds. Dreher never shies away from telling the truth about complicated family relationships.

That transparency almost wrecks the book early on. One Christmas when newly married Dreher and his wife came back to Louisiana and labored to make an authentic French meal for the family, the Lemings and Dreher’s parents refused to eat, protesting Dreher’s turning his back on his country roots. The episode paints some of the story’s protagonists as so vindictive as to make them difficult to sympathize with. Even with the rich narrative, I occasionally wanted to see more showing rather than telling, and some passages read more as a string of blogged vignettes rather than a connected narrative.

Yet these days we feel the book’s themes more and more, which demonstrates its timeliness. Continue reading →

On the roots of community

small town Ross Douthat recently linked the rise of suicide rates in the United States with the erosion of small communities and traditional institutions. Douthat went on to cite Rod Dreher’s recent book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming as a picture of how community can instill hope and purpose in a person when they are being beaten down by one difficulty or another. In a follow-up post, Douthat honed in on one particular question, which is how fidelity to a place relates to our identity in a local community:

As a sympathetic but also sometimes skeptical observer of the “Front Porch Republic” style of conservatism, I think the distinction suggested here — between a philosophy of rootedness and a philosophy that just stresses “place” in general or idolizes the rural life in particular — is central to Porcherism’s ability to offer a realistic response to the ills of contemporary American life. A communitarianism that just suggests that everyone should find their own St. Francisville is obviously unresponsive to the reality of a post-agrarian society, but a communitarianism that just tells people to “stay put!” more generally, whether in cities or suburbs or exurbs, is likewise insufficient … because to a surprising extent, Americans are already doing just that. …

So they/we need a story of what’s going on here. Is it that people are staying in place in an attempt to compensate for turmoil in their personal lives — divorced dads sticking near their kids, single mothers relying on grandparents for childcare — and our communities would be in even worse shape if Americans were moving around at the rate they did in 1980? Is it that strong communities ultimately depend on jobs and rising wages, and so we actually need people to move a little more in order to boost their economic prospects? (And is mass homeownership, in particular, a case where the desire for rootedness has had perverse effects, anchoring people to bad investments and creating stresses that no amount of neighborliness can solve?) Or is it that the flawed design of many of our communities — particularly the suburban and exurban sprawl that James Howard Kunstler famously dubbed the “geography of nowhere” — simply makes it impossible for people to put down real roots no matter how long they stay?

One of the difficulties with much of the rhetoric surrounding place and localism is that it assumes a certain cultural understanding of community without often explicitly addressing the point. This is the problem you run into, for instance, with people who have read nothing by Wendell Berry except his essays. If the only thing you read is The Unsettling of America Berry may well come off as an angry white environmentalist with a shocking streak of naivete. But if you read Jayber Crow, A Place on Earth, or Fidelity, you begin to become acquainted with the entire world associated with the place of Port William and you begin to understand that the place is more than just a physical place, but an entire world and culture marked by certain long-held-and-now-forgotten beliefs. Because localists fail to make these cultural characteristics more explicit, they can come off as saying “If people just moved back home, everything would be better,” but that isn’t quite the claim being made. (There is a further problem here, of course, with a younger set of localists who arrive at the position for purely ecological reasons and have no actual first-hand experience with the culture of localism.)

Continue reading →

Summer Reading for College Graduates

It’s late May, which means that across the world, twentysomething college students are graduating or preparing to graduate: departing campuses and communities that have shaped them deeply and venturing off into the wide open spaces of adulthood in a way that is (for most of them) wholly new. The transition from college to post-college life is a significant one for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that for many college grads, being a student (that is: being forced to read things, write papers and take exams for coveted grades) is all they have known for the last 17 or so years.

For many of them, “learning” has largely been something they associate with pressure, stress, and the confines of parental control and expectation. Education is something that has been prescribed, mapped out and scheduled-to-death for them as long as they can remember. To graduate from college, then, is among other things to liberate oneself from the notion of education as bureaucracy (curriculum checklists, units, requirements, pre-reqs, to-dos, tuition payments, etc.) and to replace it with a notion of education as a choice, or (even better) education as a pleasure. That is, if it is replaced at all.

The sad reality, I suspect, is that after degrees are conferred, many graduates consider their education to be concluded. Which I guess is the expected conclusion to an educational system primarily built around preparing students for the next thing, culminating in a college degree that translates into a job. If the telos of education is practical preparation as opposed to, say, the seeking of truth and the ability to ask questions well, then of course it makes sense that once a job is attained or a lucrative skill mastered, education ceases to be a priority.

But practical training and skill development are only part of education’s purpose. Degrees are not the end goal. Education should be a lifelong pursuit. To exist is to always be on a continuum of known and unknown, discovered and undiscovered. “We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T.S. Eliot.

That’s why, if I were to give one piece of advice to college graduates, it would be to find ways to keep the pursuit of knowledge and truth an active and lively pursuit in your life. One way to do that is to keep reading. Embrace the fact that, for the first time in many years, you can read what you want to and you won’t have to take a test or write a term paper about it. Learn to take pleasure in it. Make it a daily habit. Reading for “fun” is one of the most important things one can do to stay motivated to keep learning.

Read anything. Blogs, newspapers, magazines, tweets, billboards, poems (please read poems!), essays, journals, Wikipedia, and so on. Also, watch movies. Documentaries. Blockbusters. TV. Go to concerts. Museums. Take walks. Run. Travel. Try new restaurants. Develop an expertise or a habit. Discuss current events. Debate a friend. Sit on your front porch smoking pipes while discussing theology (or drinking scotch while discussing politics). Do any and everything you need to do in order to grow in your curiousity about the world and your desire to understand it more deeply.

Oh, and keep reading books.

On that note, I thought I’d give a few recommendations. The following are five books that have either come out recently or will be released very soon. They are books that I think are particularly inspiring and motivating for those of us who may be in a transition moment in life but still doggedly in pursuit of the good life: living, growing, thinking, believing and questioning well.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011), by Alan Jacobs

I can’t think of a better book to recommend to a graduate as a first venture into the world of post-college reading. Jacobs dispels the notion that reading should be a chore, or that only highbrow Great Books are worth our time. “Read what gives you delight–at least most of the time–and do so without shame,” he argues, making the case in characteristically elegant fashion that reading can and should be something that gives us pleasure. Happily, Jacobs’ own finesse and wit as a writer makes the book itself a pleasure to read.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013), by Douglas Rushkoff

I recommend this book as a companion piece of sorts to Jacobs’ book, with emphasis on the “age of distraction” part. Rushkoff–the media theorist guru behind the Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders–more or less attempts to connect every zeitgeist-defining thing in our world today (Instagram! Zombies! Tea Partiers!) to shape a unifying theory about how we are both more and less “present” than ever. Obvious at times but mostly quite insightful, Present Shock is the sort of “magnifying glass on your world” book that is important to read every so often because it thinks deeply and critically about contemporary life and, in turn, helps the reader to do the same.

When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is my favorite public intellectual. She has that rare, C.S. Lewis-style combination of being both a winsome communicator and an intellectual heavy-hitter. She knows a lot about a lot of things, and can write better than just about any other living writer, in both nonfiction and fiction (read her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead for proof). She is awesome, and her most recent essay collection is too. When I Was a Child I Read Books is not easy reading, to be sure. It’s challenging. But it will inspire you to want to think as broadly and as deeply as she does about a vast array of things: religion, contemporary economics, “new atheists,” science, literature, geography, Moses, hymnology, and yes, childhood reading habits.

Death by Living: Life is Meant to be Spent (2013), by N.D. Wilson

I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of this book (which comes out later this summer) and writing a review of it for Christianity Today. I can’t recommend it enough. Following and expanding upon themes in his Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl, N.D. Wilson shows that he is not only one of his generation’s most gifted and original thinkers but also one of its best writers. Featuring some of the best prose you’ll see this side of Marilynne Robinson, Death by Living is a beautiful array of memoir, theological reflection and narrative vignette that oozes wonder about the world and humility before God. For college grads cynical about things like religion, purpose-driven lives and “making a difference”–and yet unwilling to abandon these notions entirely–Death by Living is the poolside reading I recommend.

The End of Our Exploring (2013), by Matthew Lee Anderson

In a world where “dialogue” and “conversation” are buzzwords but rarely well practiced, and where doubt and questioning seem to be more about a scene than a search for truth, Matt’’s latest, The End of Our Exploring, comes as a breath of fresh air. Clearheaded, personal, witty and wise, the book presents a sensible framework for epistemology that is sorely needed today. How do we doubt, question, probe, debate, discuss and know in a more purposeful and productive manner? It’s en vogue today for young Christians to put on airs of intellectualism (you know: tweed sport coats, pipes, Jacques Ellul reading groups…), but the image of thoughtfulness is not enough. Matt’s book–a short, concise, engaging read–reminds us that actually being thoughtful is far greater (and more nuanced) than just looking the part.