When you see a bunch of frazzled parents wandering around the school supplies section of Wal Mart with long, printed lists in their hands, you know that summer is drawing to a close. Here in Tennessee, some teachers start back next week!

With this in mind, I thought I’d check in to see how your summer reading is going. Finished any interesting books lately? Any guilty pleasures? Have you spent the summer with fiction or non-fiction, or a little of both? Is there a book you keep putting off?

For some reason, I’ve been in a scholarly mood recently—I’m finishing up N.T. Wright’s Justification (which, in a lot of ways, raised more questions in my mind than answers, and also made me want to read every other N.T. Wright book ever written, particularly Jesus and the Victory of God), and I’ve just borrowed Satan and the Problem of Evil by Greg Boyd from my father, (a thick volume that is intimidating on the outside, but surprisingly accessible on the inside).

I’ve also begun research for an idea I have for my next book. Here’s a list of what I’ve ordered/checked out from the library:

Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith by Marvin R. Wilson, Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians by Lawrence Kushner, The Myth of a Christian Nation by Greg Boyd, The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, Decision Making and the Will of God by Gary Friesen, Satan and the Problem of Evil by Greg Boyd, A Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas Madden, and Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right by Anders Stephanson.

Any guesses about the topic? Here’s a hint: Like the first book, this book would be written in a memoir style.

Hope I made you curious!

So, the other day, a friend was looking through the books on my bookshelf and I suddenly became really self-conscious. I worried that he might judge my intellectual/spiritual capacity by what he saw!

What’s the most embarrassing book on your bookshelf? What’s the snobbiest? 

For me? Most embarrassing: Philosophy for Dummies or What Would MacGyver Do? Snobbiest: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.

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