Book Club Selections
Nothing generates discussion like a good book. The following books will be featured on the site over the next few months and discussed on Monday posts. Feel free to join the conversation or suggest future titles.
July: Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. Author William J. Webb analyzes the range of biblical interpretations that have historically surrounded understanding of slaves, women, and homosexuals in an attempt to “work out the hermeneutics involved in distinguishing that which is merely cultural in Scripture from that which is timeless.” Webb develops what he calls a “redemptive hermeneutic” that can be applied to these and other issues. While it would be hard to find a reader who agrees with every one of Webb’s conclusions, he writes about complicated, hot-button issues with both humility and accessibility. The book is bound to generate some interesting conversations.
August: Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw (Zondervan, 2008). In this provocative book, Claiborne and Haw present an unconventional, yet biblically-grounded, approach for relating to presidents and kings, empire and government. They remind Christians that Jesus did not preach the need to put God back into government, but rather instructed his followers to live by a different set of rules altogether. A great read for an election year, Jesus for President is refreshing in both its compelling content and its unique design. (Each page is different, full of color, doodles, art, hand-written margin notes, etc.) It is certain to spark some interesting discussions on the blog.
September: The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief by Peter Rollins (Paraclete, 2008). Rollins, author of How (Not) To Speak of God, writes that it may be necessary to betray one’s faith in order to keep it. Employing the insights of mysticism and deconstructive theory, Rollins explores the notion of “religion without religion” as a way of inspiring the Church to move beyond being a bastion of belief toward being a community of transformation. Rollins builds off of an idea he first presented in How (Not) to Speak of God, (which many recommend reading first), illustrated by the story of the movie “Amen,” where a priest in Nazi Germany gives up his Christian faith and becomes a Jew in order to identify with the persecuted, a move the priest believes is necessary in order to truly live his Christian faith. Rollins can be a bit heady, but he is also accessible and imaginative, and will certainly inspire some out-of-the-box thinking.
