Top 10 Books of 2022
For the twelfth year, I have selected my top 10 favorite books from the year. Despite beginning a full seminary load, I managed to log 40 books on Goodreads. As yet another indication that Western Theological Seminary is an incredible fit for me, many of the books assigned in classes were re-reads for me. Despite many of them being favorites in past years, I have chosen 10 first reads.
As always, I would be delighted to hear your favorites. I am particularly bad at identifying good fiction and could use some uplifting stories as I continue to read heavy books for school.
In no particular order:
Imagining Our Neighbors As Ourselves, Mary W. McCampbell
Empathy is not optional for Christians and yet it can be hard to find, especially during a pandemic or in this cultural moment of polarization. This book lays out what our biblical call to empathy looks like and where to find the resources—through art—to grow this critical muscle.
“Christian empathy asks us to be both self-sacrifical and intentional as we reach beyond our usual circles and experience to identify with those who are outcast, misunderstood, abused. We fail to love God when we neglect to see and cherish the imago Dei in other human beings… As we grow our imaginations, we need stories that can convict us of our own sins of omission or commission, enabling us to see the beautiful, complex world of our neighbors as we look beyond ourselves.”
A Map Is Only One Story, Nicole Chung
A powerful book of twenty essays on their very personal stories of the liminal space of living between cultures. What an invitation to empathy!
“There is nothing easy about migration. It is a search for a better life, but in this way it is also a death. How easily would you choose to leave this life? How quickly, if the decision were made for you? It is a line you cannot uncross, whether you are lucky enough to visit every few years or if you left knowing you will never return. Everyone and everything you knew and loved are gone.”
From Burned Out to Beloved, Bethany Dearborn Hiser
This is not a book to read and set down, but one for all of us in helping vocations to return to again and again as we integrate intentional soul care into our lives. I’m looking forward to returning to it in my course, “The Christian Interior Life,” this semester.
“The practice of holistic, trauma-informed soul care tends to the whole self in order to be grounded in God, to thrive, and to love others as we love ourselves. It involves knowing who we are, how we’re impacted by secondary trauma, and why we must be on an ongoing journey toward recovery and healing”
Christianity’s Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope, C. Kavin Rowe
An incredible book considering the impact and implications of the resurrection on the way we understand the story of scripture, what it means to be human, and how we can think institutionally.
“The early Christians could not imagine living without God. They believed that they had received the gift for the ages. And they believed that that gift was to be shared with everyone. To read the pages of the New Testament and the Christian literature immediately thereafter is to be immersed in a joy that knows laughter, delight, healing, transformation, and life are at the bottom of all things. The excitement that they had something to offer the world is palpable, and their willingness to be creative, to risk, to fail in trying, and to get up again is everywhere evident. Because they expected God to work all over the world, they had no boundaries and no limits. And because they knew that God’s human image was in every person, they invited everyone to come in, and tended even those who would not.”
The Crown and the Fire, N.T. Wright
I read this book as a devotional throughout Lent. With thirteen powerful meditations on the cross and resurrection, it offered fresh perspective on how to practice resurrection here and now.
“We can not privatize the message of the resurrection. If it is good news for us, it is good news for the world. Jesus commissions us, then, to follow him: to where the hungry sit on the ground, past anger and past hope; to where the old people are forgotten, adn the young people brutalized, where innocent villagers have their legs smashed with clubs and innocent passerby get blown up in car bombs. ‘Follow me,’ he says, ‘to where the rich people buy unhappiness in expensive wrapping-paper, to where the poor people fight for the crumbs that the rich drop by accident; folow me, to where religious people are using their religion as a screen to shut out the pain of the world, to where the unbelieving people are using the world as a screen to shut out the pain of God; follow me, to the villages and the towns, to the squatters’ camps and the refugee compounds, to the bright lights of the city and the sad darkness of the depopulated countryside, to the corridors of power and the alleyways of despair, to the married people who have forgotten how to love and the unmarried people who long for the chance to learn how, to the businessman and the prostitute, the cameldriver and the taxi driver, the security force officers and the little boys throwing stones at them. Follow me: and tell them that I love them; tell them that I died for them; tell them I am alive for them; tell them that there is a new creation; tell them that there is a new celebration; tell them that there is a God who made them and yearns for them, and that if they find me they will find him.”
American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins
A fast-paced novel following a mother and son fleeing the drug cartel that silenced their truth-telling journalist husband and father. This is a fiction account of a story arc we’ve heard again and again from those who have fled all kinds of terror.
“That Lydia and Luca will travel with Soledad and Rebeca for as long as possible has not been detailed aloud, yet it’s an arrangement all four of them intuitively understand. So much has happened that each hour of this journey feels like a year, but there’s something more than that. It’s the bond of trauma, the bond of sharing an indescribable experience together. Whatever happens, no one else in their lives will ever fully comprehend the ordeal of this pilgrimage, the characters they’ve met, the fear that travels with them, the grief and fatigue that eat at them. Their collective determination to keep pressing north. It solders them together so they feel like an almost-family now.”
Creative Quest, Questlove
My work and wellbeing require constant creativity. Questlove offers a lovely and unique guide to cultivating creativity. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook while reading. (Yay for Hoopla for a free way to do this
“Failure is not fatal. For starters, it can be a motivator. Smooth sailing isn’t always the best way to convince yourself to put your nose back to the grindstone. Struggle and frustration and fear can be great tools for learning to focus and recharge yourself. David Bowie once said that creativity is ‘one of the few human endeavors where you can crash your airplane and walk away from it.’ Creative failures can feel like near-death experiences, and surviving them can create a sense of liberation. When you walk away from your crashed airplane, you’re playing with house money. You can do anything—and hopefully you will.”
Invitations to Abundance, Alicia J. Akins
You may remember my book review of this lovely and comprehensive deep dive into the feasts of the Bible. I’m grateful to call Alicia a friend and celebrate her heart to welcome others into God’s initiating kindness as he spreads a feast before us.
“When we arrive at the wedding feast, realities now encased in inadequate words will become gloriously concrete. Everything now hinted and shadowed will be made sublimely manifest. Our souls and senses will be inundated with the realization of the ignorance of what we now call knowledge and of the shallowness of what we now call depth. We will see the great chasm that yawns between our highest thoughts and the most basic of divine realities. Ours will join a sea of bruised hands—some raised in praise, some clapping in jubilant wonder, some wiping tears of joy from the corner of their awe-filled eyes. A whole new language for worship will ring forth, but more importantly, the force of a whole new understanding will propel its chorus forward from our lips.”
My Body Is Not A Prayer Request, Amy Kenny
With my deep disappointment with the response of Christians to a global pandemic and the centering of the able-bodied instead of those most vulnerable, I have been devouring books and resources that challenge my own everyday assumptions over disability and how to follow Jesus with his post-resurrection scars.
“May your story and disabled body teach the church what it means to bear God’s image. May you know who you are and not who they tell you to be. I pray that you know in the deepest part of your gut, and the loftiest neurons in your brain, that you are fearfullly and wonderfully made. That your diagnosis doesn’t take away from God’s radiance that you display to the world. That God smiles upon you and declares you sanctified and redeemed. That you are cherished just as you are, crutches, chemical sensitiviites, and all. And on days when you are out of stamina for carrying the weight of everyone else’s ableism, may the disabled God remind you that your disabled body is pure, holy, set free, capable, and meaningful to the kingdom. You are not a before picture in a prayer makeover or the symbol of sin used to guilt everyone into repenting. No, you, disabled friend, bear the image of the Creator of light, the Author and Perfecter of our faith, and the Alpha and the Omega. You are God’s workmanship.”
Practicing Lament, Rebekah Ecklund
The practice of structured lament has been critical to my faith and formed through more books and resources than I can count. So I was delighted when this excellent primer on lament came out. This is the place for all beginners to the practice of lament, this critical antidote to denial and despair.
“Lament is for the wide and often painful gap between the dawn and the sunrise. It’s for the agonizingly long pause that has gone on for thousands of years now between the first glimpse of dawn and the sunrise still to come. It’s for life in-between the times: in-betweeen Christ’s first coming and his second one, in-between the old age and the new one to come. Christians all over the world pray “Your Kingdom come” as part of the prayer that Jesus taught his followers to pray. It’s a petition prayed in the context of all the ways that God’s kingdom has not yet come, for the ways that God’s justice and peace and harmony do not yet reign. It’s a petition for all the times we whisper, Someday.”