What's the Pastor Reading this Summer?

The summer of 2016 is an especially rich one for reading. Lot's of new books among religion publishers. I'm almost too overwhelmed to get any of them from the "to read" pile into the "done reading" pile.
But here are a few titles--

The Road to Character, by David Brooks. (Random House, 2015) I've wanted to get through this since a discussion about it from the NEXT Church conference in Atlanta last March. Brooks' columns in the New York Times are well-known. It was interesting to listen to him think through his own moral maturation in the light of well-known personalities he admires: labor activist Francis Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower (one of the presidents that may have actually been a Presbyterian), Dorothy Day, civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, George Eliot (nee Mary Anne Evans), Augustine of Hippo (the one many call "saint'), and Samuel Johnson. Brooks is a master at capturing the big picture of cultural America and its movements. The deeply religious AND spiritual lives of each of these serve Brook's aim to trace the development of ethical personhood and plumb the depths of moral bankruptcy he sees in the current culture.

America's Original Sin, by Jim Wallis. (Brazos Press, 2016) Wallis' theses: Racism is a faith issue for Christians. Can this summer's events be any more clear? The book came out right in the middle of the resurgence of the topic in the political campaign. How can we afford to look the other way any more? Another book in the same topic has just been released and is the entry on the "to read" pile: The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner, 2016) It takes its title from James Baldwin’s 1963 The Fire Next Time. Ward has collected essays and poems about race from important voices of her generation.

The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones. (Simon & Schuster, 2016). Jones is founder and CEO of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that describes itself as a non-partisan research group for the examination of attitudes on the intersection of religion and public policy. The book came out to much fan fare.  It is a quick read, with lots of statistics and anecdotes that illustrate the author's thesis: White Christian America is dead, that is, the hegemony of Northern European-descended Protestants instrumental in the founding of the United States and its governance since then, in both public elected and private leadership, is gone, never to come back again. Surviving so far are two strains of Protestant Christians--evangelicals primarily in the South, and the mainline Protestants in the Northeast and upper Mid-West.  It remains to be seen if either of them will last the next twenty years.

You might think I have a bad case of the doldrums about the state of the American Christian church after reading all these downers, but not so.  Loving Jesus, by Mark Allan Powell (Augsburg Fortress, 2004), an older spiritual biography genre is a kinder, gentler look back on the aftermath of the "Jesus Movement" in the 1970's. Powell's life sets me smiling about the reason for it all.

Next on my reading list, Ruined (a memoir), by Ruth Everhart.  Just came out yesterday! Ruth is a talented writer and pastor in my local presbytery.  I can't wait to read her story.