May Reading Log

The 100 degree days have arrived, the air conditioner is on at all times, and the book stack is as high as ever. Here's how I started my summer reading:

5 Articles I Like This Month

"The Hardest Job in the World" by John Dickerson, The Atlantic. 55 minutes.

As the article's subtitle asks, "what if the problem isn't the president—it's the presidency?" In this lengthy but fascinating piece, newsman John Dickerson (co-host of CBS This Morning and former host of Face the Nation) analyzes the ways in which the presidency has become an unmanageable job for any one man to do, and offers insights into how minimizing the most powerful position in the world might actually serve the country—not to mention future presidents themselves.

"Are Kids the Enemy of Writing?" by Michael Chabon, GQ, 9 minutes.

Richard Yates once said that authors lose a book for every child they have. In this essay, Michael Chabon, author of fourteen books and father of four children, examines whether Yates was on to something—whether, to borrow from the article's title, kids are the enemy of writing, then ultimately asking himself the bigger question of what kind of legacy he wants to leave. Personal, beautiful, and affecting work from my favorite author.

"Mothers in Peril" by Ricardo Nuila, Texas Monthly, 24 minutes.

In Texas, the rate of mothers who die during or soon after birth is on the rise, including a startling spike from 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births to 38.7 between 2010 and 2012. This piece investigates all the possible reasons for this, ranging from changes in data handling to socioeconomic factors to a state health care system that values babies more than mothers. One of best pieces of investigative journalism I've read in a long time.

"At Santa Fe High School, my daughter phoned: 'I'm hiding in a closet. I love you, Mom.'" by Deedra Van Ness, Houston Chronicle, 14 minutes.


A chilling, heartbreaking first-person account about the Santa Fe shooting written by the parents of a Santa Fe student. As difficult to read as it is necessary.

The Athletic

Not one great article, but a site full of them. If you're willing to pay for a subscription (mine cost $35 for the year), you have access to ad-free sportswriting by everyone from Ken Rosenthal to Bob Sturm to Jayson Stark to superstar-in-the-making Levi Weaver. This has become my go-to site for both local coverage of the DFW teams and national coverage, particularly of MLB. Best sports site since Grantland.

LETTERS & PAPERS FROM PRISON by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Reading diaries and collections of letters reminds me a lot of browsing at a used bookstore. The vast majority of what's there is filler (at least as far you're concerned), stuff you couldn't care less about. But then, every now and then, something jumps out at you that makes the whole experience worthwhile. Having to wade through the stacks of filler makes it all the more satisfying when you come upon something brilliant. So the real test of a collection of letters, diary entries, notes, etc., is 1) how much filler you have to sort through and 2) how brilliant the brilliant parts are. And according to both criteria, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters & Papers from Prison is the best letter collection I've ever read.

For those unfamiliar with his background, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and pastor who opposed the Nazis from the beginning of their rise to power. Eventually he became one of the leaders of the Confessing Church, a group of German Christians who opposed state control of the church and proclaimed that Christ, not the Fuhrer, was head of the church. For his opposition to the Nazis and his eventual work with the underground resistance in Germany, Bonhoeffer was jailed and ultimately executed in a concentration camp.

All the letters and notes in this volume were written during his time in prison as he awaited news of his fate, with most written to his best friend Eberhard Bethge and to his parents. Many of the letters are perfunctory, with him asking his parents to send him books, congratulating Eberhard on the birth of his son, etc. But especially in the later letters, Bonhoeffer delves into complex questions about Christianity's role in the post-war world, questioning how the church (particularly the German church) can move forward after its failures. His insights are fascinating, as is his writing. And even the "filler" letters, given his context are interesting in their own way—it's not every day you get to climb inside the head of someone taken prisoner by the Nazis.

Bonhoeffer has been compared endlessly to the apostle Paul, and while that's clearly a stretch, I better understand the comparison after reading this collection—both men were jailed and ultimately martyred for their faith, both men led their churches even from prison, and both men's letters continue to speak to us today. Like any letter collection, come to this one with a highlighter in hand, ready to sort the wheat from the tares—but you may be surprised by just how little you wind up throwing out.

LEARNING TO WALK IN THE DARK by Barbara Brown Taylor

When you think of darkness, your response is almost certainly negative. Literally, darkness is something we fear as children and subsequently eliminate as adults. Metaphorically, darkness is representative of fear, chaos, and sin. Darkness, says the conventional wisdom, is bad.

But in Learning to Walk in the Dark, world-renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor argues that darkness is not something to be eliminated from our lives, but learned from. Pushing back against what she calls "full solar spirituality," a sort of keep-on-the-sunny side faith that either refuses to acknowledge life's dark patches or regards them as failures of faith, Taylor seeks to redeem darkness as a natural part of life, and one that teaches us things we cannot learn in the light.

That's a simple premise that is beautifully made in the first 50 pages...but the book runs nearly 200. Undergoing experiments from spelunking in a dark cave to watching the moon rise, Taylor spends the book better acquainting herself with literal darkness in order to better understand spiritual darkness, and while her writing is never anything short of a pleasure to read, her insights are few and far between, especially as the book progresses. I approached this book with a highlighter in hand, but didn't need to take the cap off once in the last 50 pages.

As befits her vocation, this book is basically one long sermon, with exegesis, illustrations, and applications sprinkled throughout in the pursuit of one Big Idea. For me, this particular sermon was a little longer than it needed to be, and I didn't have to take many notes, but its core idea was gold. Not Taylor's best work (the reviews I glanced at tend to agree), but worth a read for anyone wondering what the darker parts of life can teach us about God and about ourselves.

PURITY by Jonathan Franzen

On most lists of "greatest living novelists," Jonathan Franzen is in the top 5, if not occupying the #1 spot. The Corrections and Freedom were both rapturously praised in literary circles, were both Oprah's Book Club choices, and were witty, brilliant encapsulations of the decades in which they were written. So I decided to make this month Jonathan Franzen Month in the ol' reading log by knocking out the other two Franzen novels I owned—his most recent novel and his first.

Purity, unfortunately, does not come close to measuring up to Freedom or The Corrections. Where those books told small stories about big ideas, Purity ambitiously goes big, globe-hopping from the U.S. to late-1980s East Germany to the jungles of Bolivia, dealing with everything from murder to Wikileaks-like hacking. The plot is difficult to describe in a sentence and stretches over decades. The problem is that, for all its size and scope, I just didn't care.

Purity, for all its narrative ambition, deals with a small cast of characters, who over the course of the novel are revealed to be far more connected than they first appear. The heroine is Purity "Pip" Taylor, an archetypal struggling millenial; the hero is Andreas Wolf, a Julian Assange cipher with a dark past. A pair of fearless journalists also make the scene, along with an heiress who conforms to every stereotype of an artist you've ever heard. And for all the time we spend with these characters, watching their lives intertwine with one another's, at no point did I start to care about them as people. The characters driving Franzen's plot are the weak link in this novel.

Franzen has a decent enough story. He has some interesting points to make about life in the Internet age, about truth, and about moral purity. And few people, if any, can make sentences sing like he does. But told through these unlikable, melodramatic characters, the good in this novel gets lost in the bad. I've seen this book on clearance at a number of used bookstores, something that always irked me, since I bought it the week it came out for full price...now I understand why so many Franzen fans were comfortable selling their copies for store credit. It's not awful by any means, but you've got at least 2,000 pages of Franzen you should read before you worry about picking up Purity.

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY by Jonathan Franzen

Woof. This was a first novel, and it read like one. The Twenty-Seventh City is actually the closest thing to a thriller Franzen has ever written, but it's not thrilling. It has the largest cast of characters, but you never feel like you get to know any of them. It has perhaps the most ambitious plot, but fails to pair that ambition with results. Simply put, this book's not very good.

The Twenty-Seventh City tells the convoluted story of a political conspiracy orchestrated by the new police chief, a plot that winds up employing everything from kidnapping to sex to terrorism to accomplish its intended goals. Featuring everyone from the chief herself to the local power brokers to an Indian gun-for-hire, the story is ultimately meant to serve as a sort of parable for big city governance and corruption.

Sounds pretty interesting, right? It would be, if you ever felt like you a grip on what was happening. Unfortunately, there are two big problems. First, The Twenty-Seventh City suffers from War and Peace-itis—there are so may characters that it takes you several hundred pages to have a grasp of how they all relate to one another and who matters most. Second, instead of employing a normal narrative style, Franzen writes more experimentally, abruptly shifting from a character's inner monologue to narrating the events of the plot (a technique he has all but abandoned since).

It all adds up to a soup of words, characters, and plot that left me feeling much more appreciative of Purity, the work of an author who's now had time to hone his craft. There are sentences that sing in The Twenty-Seventh City, raw talent on display, but the end result is a mixed bag. When I squint hard enough I can see what he was going for, but 517 pages is a long time to squint. Jonathan Franzen is a supremely gifted writer, but this book is for completists only.

JACK KIRBY'S FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS VOL. 1-4

In 1970, Jack "the King" Kirby, the Lennon to Stan Lee's McCartney, rocked the comic book world when he moved from Marvel to D.C. Upon his arrival there, he proposed to the brass at D.C. a bold new initiative, a sprawling epic that came to be known, for no clear reason, as "the Fourth World." This new superhero mythology would stretch across four different titles—The New Gods, The Forever People, Mister Miracle, and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson (yes, you read that correctly)—and would tell the story of two worlds at war with earth as their battleground, with every issue written and drawn by Kirby. It would be epic, dynamic, and action-packed...and unfortunately, unfinished. Due to low sales, the Fourth World titles were all cancelled by 1973.

However, with hindsight, many Kirby fans have come to consider the Fourth World to be arguably his best work, and certainly his most distinctive. With an inker as his only collaborator on all these titles, the Fourth World books were Kirby's best chance to really let his imagination go wild. So I spent the last two months feasting on the Fourth World Omnibuses, collections that print every Fourth World issue, in full color, in the chronology in which they were printed. Let's go title by title.

The flagship book, and easily the best, is The New Gods. This book is the grandest in scope, telling the story of Orion, a noble but savage warrior from the peaceful world of New Genesis, and the cold, cruel Darkseid, ruler of Apokolips. Each issue deals with the cold war Darkseid has begun against New Genesis, a war launched on Earth, and with Orion's attempts to foil Darkseid's plots. Most of the Fourth World mythology comes from this book, and both the art and the characters are better here than in any of the other Fourth World books.

The Forever People is my second favorite title. It deals with a group of superpowered New Genesis teenagers, not-so-sneakily based on the hippies of the time, and their own fights against Darkseid and his minions. Unlike The New Gods, this book forced Kirby to work with a group dynamic, and while the results are mixed, there's enough imagination in here to power the book, especially in the early issues.

Mister Miracle may be the character who has endured best, along with his eventual wife Big Barda. Mister Miracle, a.k.a. Scott Free (yes, really), is an escape artist raised on Apokolips. Eventually it would be revealed that he and Orion had been switched at birth as part of a long-ago pact between New Genesis and Apokolips, meaning that Orion was Darkseid's son and Mister Miracle the son of Highfather, ruler of New Genesis. This book is the most superhero-y of the four, which may also explain why it lasted the longest, with Mister Miracle continuing 7 issues longer than the others, albeit by essentially scrapping all the Fourth World connections.

And then there's Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson...yikes. Legend has it that Kirby went to D.C.'s publisher and told them to give him their lowest selling title and he'd turn it into their best book. The tale is apocryphal, both because Kirby never actually made such a deal and because this couldn't possibly have been D.C.'s best title. There's imagination on display, to be sure—this title was never more interesting than when Kirby was in control of it—but this book is a mess. Too much going on, too many characters, and notoriously bad dialogue make for a painful reading experience. The art's pretty though (you never have to worry about that with Jack Kirby.)

The Fourth World isn't for everyone. Kirby had a tin ear for dialogue, his art is an acquired taste (though once you've acquired it, you'll never go back), and if you prefer the simplicity of superheroes to mythology, you may want to look elsewhere. But there's no denying the impact that this big, unfinished epic has had on comics. Long live the King.

MONSTER MASTERWORKS by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers, and Bill Everett

In interviews over the last 5 decades, Stan Lee has often bemoaned the state of Marvel Comics prior to the day that he and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four (and thereby the Marvel Universe.) "We were turning out comics by the carload, but nothing was really happening," he once said. Mostly, "we were blithely turning out merry little monster stories." Well, Stan the Man may not have much affection for those monster stories, but somebody did, because this volume collects eighteen of those 1950s-era stories. And I loved them!

Monster stories are one of my favorite sub-genres (I've seen the original Godzilla movie, Goijira, 3 times and counting), so this trade paperback was made for me. Every story is written in the now-familiar cadence of Stan Lee, with stories illustrated by artists who would some day bring the world Spider-Man (Steve Ditko), Daredevil (Bill Everett), and...well, everyone else in the Marvel Universe (Jack Kirby). The stories run as little as 5 pages and no longer than 15, since these stories were found in anthology magazines.

Divided into three sections (Alien Invaders, Man-Made Monsters, and Ancient Menaces), the book features monsters with names like Tim Boo Ba, Kraa the Unhuman, Zzutak, and, most famously, Fin Fang Foom. Everything from the art to the storytelling to the moral at the end of every story is the kind of dated, cheesy kid's stuff I eat up. These stories, as Stan's quotes indicate, weren't particularly ambitious. But boy were they fun.

So if you've every wanted to know how humanity could outwit a gigantic sea monster or what a Transylvanian village would do to defend itself from a giant amoeba, this is the book for you. Try not to smile while reading, I dare you.

THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN MARVEL by Jim Starlin

Some characters are better dead than alive.

That sounds meaner than intended, I promise. But the truth is that, for the first 15 years of his existence, the alien (Kree, for those keeping score at home) captain Mar-Vell, known on Earth as Captain Marvel, was a B-level character in every sense. He didn't have much personality, he didn't have any standout villains or supporting characters, and he never really made much of an impact on the Marvel Universe. He was the kind of character who might guest star in an Avengers issue and make you say, "Oh yeah, I forgot about him! Does he still have his own book?"

But that all changed with the 1982 graphic novel, "The Death of Captain Marvel." In this story, readers learn the final fate of Mar-Vell—he finally falls, not in battle with Thanos, but of cancer. With fellow heroes from the Marvel Universe at his bedside, a weakened Mar-Vell slips into a coma and dies in his sleep. Before this climactic scene, readers get a sort of retrospective of the character's history, written and illustrated by Jim Starlin, who had a lengthy run on the Captain Marvel title in the 1970s, along with one final confrontation with Thanos (albeit via a hallucination). By the time Mar-Vell's mentor (appropriately named Mentor) announces, "He's gone," you have come to deeply respect a character you likely never cared for previously.

The story, as well as the touchingly human way in which Mar-Vell dies, was so well-told that Captain Marvel remained dead for nearly 5 decades, putting him in league with Uncle Ben, Thomas and Martha Wayne, and Bucky Barnes (er, scratch that), as characters who simply were not allowed to be resurrected. Having finally gotten around to reading this story, I now understand why. It's a short story about an otherwise forgettable character, but this is how you do a proper sendoff. Before you see the Brie Larson-helmed Captain Marvel movie next March, give this story a shot to see what the original Captain Marvel was all about.

More Than Pretending (Friday Devotional)

“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

- Hosea 6:6

“How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

- 1 John 3:17-18

At least twice a day, my son walks up to me with a metal pot in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, pleading with me to try his latest culinary masterpiece. When I peer inside the pot, it is, of course, empty, but that doesn’t stop him from begging me to take the outstretched spoon and lift it to my lips. What’s happening is as obvious as it is adorable: he’s pretending. There’s no food inside the pot, but it’s fun for him to mimic the behavior he’s seen from me and his mom.

But I’ve noticed something else. Despite the fun he has pretending there’s real food in that pot, when he’s actually hungry he doesn’t go near it—he goes straight for the fridge or the pantry, where he knows he can get a snack. Pretending is fine sometimes, but when he’s hungry, only real food satisfies.

It occurs to me that when it comes to the Greatest Commandment—to love God and love your neighbor—sometimes the best we’re willing to do is pretend to love. Aware we need to love God, we’re willing to go to church occasionally, to read our Bible, to drop a dollar in the offering plate when it’s passed around—but instead of doing so as outward expressions of inward devotion to God, these actions are merely masks we put on to maintain appearances. Aware we need to love our neighbors, we publicly send them thoughts and prayers, but we’re unwilling to quietly do the work of caring and helping.

The Bible is clear that God calls us to more than such ‘pretend love.’ The love Christ demonstrated on the cross was sacrificial and steadfast; Jesus’s concern was not how his death would be perceived, but who it would save. As Jesus’s disciples, we must learn from his example, loving both God and people with selfless sincerity, less concerned with how we look than with whom we love.

Pretending to love is easier than the real thing—it takes less time, less energy, and less patience. But ultimately, pretend love is as empty as my son’s pot of pretend food. So as you seek to follow the Greatest Commandment, remember this: only real love satisfies.

Lifelong Learning (Friday Devotional)

At that time the seer Hanani came to King Asa of Judah, and said to him, “Because you relied on the king of Aram, and did not rely on the Lord your God, the army of the king of Aram has escaped you. Were not the Ethiopians and the Libyans a huge army with exceedingly many chariots and cavalry? Yet because you relied on the Lord, he gave them into your hand. For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the entire earth, to strengthen those whose heart is true to him. You have done foolishly in this; for from now on you will have wars.”

- 2 Chronicles 16:7-9

Last Saturday, I spent the better part of the day at a pair of graduation ceremonies, watching first my wife and then my brother get their respective master’s degrees. Like most graduations, both of theirs featured speeches from the university presidents, chancellors, and provosts. The content of every speech differed slightly from its predecessor, but there was a note that echoed throughout the day, something every speaker wanted to emphasize: the importance of lifelong learning. The speakers wanted to make sure graduates understood that no degree was a license to quit thinking, exploring, and understanding. The task of every graduate, they said, was to build upon the knowledge their education had imparted, to never stop learning. Graduation was not the end of a finite journey, merely the next step in a lifetime of education.

That message came to mind this week as I read the brief biography of King Asa of Judah, found in 2 Chronicles 14-16. According to the author, King Asa was a good king for most of his 41-year reign—he removed pagan altars and shrines from the land, pointed the people back to God’s commandments, and as a result was blessed with peace and prosperity for most of his reign. When war did eventually come to Judah, Asa prayed to God for help before doing anything else, trusting God to give His people the victory, and his faith was rewarded when Judah won an overwhelming victory over superior numbers.

But when a neighboring nation attacked in the final years of Asa’s reign, he chose a different way. This time, instead of seeking God’s aid, he went straight to the king of Aram, offering him riches from the Temple’s treasuries in exchange for a military alliance against his enemy. In the ensuing fight, his short-lived alliance gave him victory, but it came at a cost: a prophet of God promised Asa that there would be no more peace for the remainder of his reign, and that he had cost himself victories by preferring human assistance to divine aid.

Asa, who had spent decades faithfully seeking God first, made a mistake much like the one those graduation speakers warned against: when it came to his relationship with God, he decided he had nothing more to learn. As the years had gone by, he’d started to regard God’s victories as his victories, God’s power as his power. So when opposition came, instead of remembering God as his source of strength, he instead treated God like training wheels, a helpful aid that he’d now outgrown.

The older you get and the more God blesses you, the more tempting it becomes to think that you’ve somehow moved past your need for Him, that prayer and worship are crutches you can discard after a while. But the truth that King Asa bears witness to is that your relationship with God is not something you outgrow, but something you mature into. There is no amount of money, influence, or education that will remove your need for a Savior—so if your desire is to know God, prepare for a lifetime of learning.

New Year's Resolution Update

The conventional wisdom on New Year's resolutions is that no one keeps them. Gym passes purchased on December 31 are buried in the glove box by February, vows to quit smoking are broken after the first stressful week of the year...you get the picture.

So my strategy for 2018 was simple: I'll make lots of resolutions, of varying ambition, and then I'm bound to stick to at least a couple of them. We're more than a third of the way through 2018...let's see how it's going so far.

1. Blog once per week

Rats, we're starting off with one where I'm falling short. My intentions were good! After all, I like to think, I like to write, and one or two people tell me they like to read what I write...ergo, I thought I should blog more. Well, I was doing ok through January, but quickly fell back into my usual pattern: a devotional every week (which I specified would not count for this resolution), a reading log every month (which would)...and that's about it.

Turns out, it takes a little more free time, a little more discipline, and a little more want-to in order to get a blog post up every week. But hey, you're reading one right now. Progress!

2. Talk to every member of my family once a week

I've been keeping this one...at least the way I remembered stating it. Unfortunately, I remembered it incorrectly. I thought the resolution was "talk to a member of my family [any member] on a daily basis." Thing is, I tended to pick the same couple of family members, which meant weeks might go by without me talking to the others.

Half credit.

3. Read the Bible in a year

Yay, my first successful resolution! Following a plan from Christianity.com (the first one that came up when I Googled "read the Bible in a year"), I started on January 1 with Genesis 1 and am currently midway through 2 Chronicles, having never gotten more than a day behind schedule. Since the point of this resolution was simply to read the Bible, not intensely study it, I've been reading from The Message by Eugene Peterson most of the time, which has made familiar stories come alive in new ways and helped me more easily understand less familiar stories. It's not a good translation for studying (because it's a paraphrase, not a translation), but it's great for reading.

4. Drink more water

One of my easiest resolutions, and one of my most abject failures. Never even started taking this one seriously. Sigh.

5. Complete the Navy SEAL workout (minus the swimming portion)

Did exactly one workout of the required push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and running for week one of the program. Was still sore two days later, so I decided to give it another day before resuming the program. And here I am, having still not resumed the program.

But hey, it's going to be 95+ degrees from now until September, so odds are I'll get back on the horse soon, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

6. Give half my entertainment money to charity

Check. I mentioned in my initial post that I wanted to give based on the people groups listed in Matthew 25—the hungry/thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned—so I chose these organizations and causes:

• For the hungry and thirsty, the Texas Baptist Hunger Offering, which helps fund over 130 hunger relief and development programs across the state and around the world.
• For the stranger, Buckner International, which (among other amazing programs) is deeply involved in foster care and adoption for children in need of safe, loving homes.
• For the naked, Mission Waco, which, quoting their mission statement, provides "Christian-based, holistic, relationship-based programs that empower the poor and marginalized" of my city.
• For the sick, a Baylor medical missions trip to Pignon, Haiti that occurred March 2-9 (for obvious reasons, I front-loaded my giving to them instead of spacing it out over the 12 months of 2018.)
• For the imprisoned, Hospitality House in Huntsville, a free home-away-from-home for families visiting prisoners at the federal penitentiary.

These are all fabulous organizations and causes; please consider giving to them yourself.

7. Learn sabermetric terms better

This was one of the easier and more fun resolutions—how hard could it be for me to learn more about baseball? But other than reading more articles on FanGraphs during spring training and an article in the Athletic explaining ISO, I have put zero effort into this one.

But it's a long season, and my team is too terrible to waste all my baseball time on. So there's still hope.

8. Construct the perfect scorecard

I bought graph paper. So there's that.

9. Learn to cook 50 meals

This is the resolution for which I'm proudest of my progress, because I am right on schedule. One night per week I've made something new, from a simple Tex-Mex casserole to a pot of chili to garlic herb spaghetti with chicken meatballs. And while I still don't like to cook (pretty sure that's never going to happen), I think I may be getting ever so slightly better in the kitchen. I curse less, anyway. 

Favorite recipe so far: probably Swedish meatballs, which was the perfect balance of being completely new to me but also delicious. Least favorite: peach whiskey chicken. First I forgot to turn the oven on after making all the necessary preparations, meaning it went into the freezer that night and we went out. Then, when I did finally cook it, I realized that in halving the recipe I'd forgotten to divide one ingredient by two: the whiskey. After taking one bite, let's just say that was not a dish I was comfortable eating at noon on a weekday, much less serving my toddler. You win some, you lose some.

10. Finish all my comic books/graphic novels

Probably my easiest resolution, and I'm right on target. Should be done by the end of August if my estimate is correct (and I don't buy anything new.)

11. Write a book

Ha. Ha. Ha.

12. Learn biblical Greek, biblical Hebrew, Latin, and German

I brought my Greek and Hebrew textbooks home from the office, where they have rested dutifully in my nightstand waiting to be opened. They're still waiting.

I did get an added dose of motivation this past week, however, with Baylor's Board of Regents officially approving the PhD in Preaching program that prompted this resolution. The inaugural class will begin in 2019, so the countdown to me learning/relearning these languages has begun. Probably ought to open those textbooks now.

13. Learn Spanish

I got the Duolingo app and used it for 2 days. So, you know, better than I've done with the other languages.


So by my count, I'm 4.5 for 13...not too shabby, but hopefully I can turn things around on a few more and get above 50% by the end of the year. I'll check back in around September and we'll see how these resolutions are going by then. Who knows, maybe I'll be writing that blog post in German by then!

[Narrator: He won't be.]

Won't You Be My Neighbor? (Friday Devotional)

‘“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” [Jesus asked.] The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”’

- Luke 10:36-37a

“Won’t you be my neighbor?” That was the question Fred Rogers asked his viewers, week after week, on the PBS television program Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Before he ever walked around the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, checking in with King Friday and X the Owl and all the rest, he first extended that invitation. Whoever you were, wherever you were watching, you could be Mr. Rogers’ neighbor, simply because he was willing to treat you as one.

As believers in Christ, we could learn something from Mr. Rogers’ approach. When Jesus was asked who we should consider to be our neighbors, he responded with the now-famous parable of the Good Samaritan, regaling his listeners with a story about a man beaten and left for dead only to be rescued by a Samaritan who did what a priest and Levite had already failed to do: rescue the man from immediate harm and set him on a path to restoration.

When we hear the parable, there is a tendency to reduce its characters to stereotypes. The priest and Levite become legalistic, hypocritical religious authorities with hard hearts, stand-ins for the Pharisees Jesus so often butted heads with. The Samaritan becomes a saintly hero, eager to show mercy to a man in need. When the characters are caricatured like this, it leaves little room for us to apply their story to our own lives—the priest and Levite become the moral low bar, easy to leap over without even trying; the Samaritan becomes an impossible goal we can never reasonably be expected to achieve.

But remember Jesus’s question after telling the story: “which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man?” In the parable, the man who fell in the robbers’ hands was an utter stranger to the priest, Levite, and Samaritan alike…but only one of them treated him that way.

If a fellow priest had laid dying there by the side of the road, the passing priest almost certainly would have attended to him. If it had been a Levite battered and bleeding, the passing Levite would have done whatever he could to help. There’s nothing heroic about it, that’s just what people do for their friends, family, and neighbors. What set the Samaritan apart was that he chose to see a stranger as a neighbor. And when it was no longer ‘some guy’ dying in the ditch, but his own neighbor, he was compelled to help.

What Jesus calls us to through this parable is the same mindset Mr. Rogers spent decades teaching small children: if you’ll allow yourself to think it, anyone can be your neighbor. The day laborer who speaks only Spanish, the small business owner opening her third franchise, the mentally ill panhandler, the stay-at-home mom battling postpartum depression, the cashier who forgot to double-bag your groceries—all the people you barely acknowledge each day—all of these strangers are suddenly your neighbors when you see them with Jesus’s eyes.

Our increasingly polarized culture demands that you see all but your inner circle as strangers, that trying to understand, let alone help, those who are different from you is an exercise in futility. Sticking to your tribe is the safest thing to do in the culture of outrage. But the follower of Christ chooses love over safety, because there are no strangers in the kingdom of God. May your life be a constant invitation to those around you: won’t you be my neighbor?

Getting Your Attention (Friday Devotional)

Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

- Matthew 25:41-46

A few weeks ago, my wife and I were enjoying a much-anticipated date night at a restaurant in Clifton when something caught our attention. We’d been delighting in the food, the atmosphere, and each other’s company, barely even noticing what was going on beyond our table of two. But then we started to hear a rat-tat-tat sound above us—faint at first, but then louder and faster. Within minutes, the sound became thunderous. A quick look outside made clear what was happening: a downpour of not only rain, but golf ball-sized hail.

The live band in the corner of the restaurant stopped playing, unable to compete with the cacophony of rain and hail pounding the metal roof. And table by table, people rose from their seats to walk to the window and watch the storm furiously descend upon the town. Every conversation in the restaurant—about work and family and current events and any number of things—stopped, replaced by the same questions: how big are the hailstones? Where’d you park your car? How long do you think this’ll last?

The storm ended up dissipating almost as suddenly as it had arrived, its furious peak lasting all of 5 minutes. Person after person returned to their tables, conversations resumed, and the band started playing again. But I was struck by what I’d witnessed: for just a few minutes, God had forced us to stop and pay attention to what He was doing.

It’s difficult for God to catch our attention on a day-to-day basis. We’re so caught up in our little lives, worried about the big project at work and the family reunion next month and the soccer game we’re late for, that it seems like we’re only really listening to God during the time we’ve begrudgingly given Him on Sunday mornings. If He wants our attention outside of that hour, then He’d better show up with thunder and lightning, otherwise we probably won’t notice.

But Jesus warns us that God is often trying to get our attention in subtler ways—and woe unto us if we’re not paying attention. Sometimes God calls to us from the whirlwind, but other times—perhaps even more often—He does so with the voices unheard by polite society, the voices Jesus listened to when no one else would. If we are to call ourselves Jesus’s followers, we must listen to their voices too, because to fail “the least of these” is to fail the Lord himself.

The Lord can stop you in your tracks with what insurance adjustors call “acts of God,” those awesome displays of devastation and grandeur—and sometimes He does. But sometimes He will try to get your attention with something far less majestic, far less impressive, but far more meaningful: a person you can help. The only question is, will you stop and notice?

April Reading Log

Just 4 books this month, since one of them was a 1,000+ page doorstop (albeit one that was super entertaining.) And while you won't find any comics at the bottom like you're used to, that's only because I'm smack dab in the middle of a series that spanned several years and hundreds of pages. Look for a review in next month's log.

Anyway, on to April's reading!

4 Articles I Like This Month

"The White Darkness: A Solitary Journey Across Antarctica" by David Grann, The New Yorker. 88 minutes.

A remarkable story of legacy, struggle, and perseverance, this article profiles the efforts of Henry Worsley to emulate and even surpass his hero, the arctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, by crossing Antarctica single-handed. Long, but worth the time if you like real-life adventure stories.

"The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma" by Junot Díaz, The New Yorker. 20 minutes.

The most impactful thing I read this month by a mile. A heartbreaking, intimate, soul-searching, brutally honest story, told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, of how being raped at age 8 changed his entire life. If you ever follow up on my reading recommendations, don't miss this one.

"'Who Can Explain the Athletic Heart?': The Past and Perilous Future of Sports Illustrated" by Michael MacCambridge, The Ringer. 24 minutes.


Once unthinkable, the death of Sports Illustrated as a print magazine (much less a relevant one) now seems virtually inevitable. In this article, Michael MacCambridge, author of The Franchise, the 1997 history of the magazine, examines what made Sports Illustrated the powerhouse it was for decades, why it has declined over the last decade, and and what it must to to survive.

"The Plunging Morale of America's Service Members" by Phil Klay, The Atlantic. 31 minutes.

Do you care about the military? You would probably answer defensively, "Of COURSE I do!" Ok, so a follow-up question: name the 3 countries in which U.S. combat troops are currently deployed. In this article, Phil Klay (a Marine veteran), examines how difficult it is for most people who enthusiastically and affirmatively answer the first question to then answer the second, making the compelling case that the only Americans who seem to really care about American wars anymore are the men and women fighting them. His question is how much longer we can ask our troops to die for causes we've lost interest in...and when our disinterest will start to affect their ability to fight. (*By the way, the answer to the second question was Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.*)

THE GREAT OMISSION: RECLAIMING JESUS'S ESSENTIAL TEACHINGS ON DISCIPLESHIP by Dallas Willard

I've mentioned in previous reading logs that I'm slowly working my way through some of my assigned texts from seminary, books that I had to speed through at the time instead of getting to take the time they required. In most cases, rereading those books at a more deliberate pace has been a great experience and has changed my perception of works that I'd previously regarded negatively.

Well, you win some and you lose some: The Great Omission was as disappointing as I remembered it being. I first read this book as part of a class entirely devoted to reading and discussing the works of Dallas Willard, a noted Christian author and professor whose writings on discipleship and spiritual formation fundamentally shaped many believers, including noted fellow authors like Richard Foster and Eugene Peterson. That class was one of my favorites in my time at seminary, and I loved several of the Willard books we read—The Divine Conspiracy, Willard's most famous book, may well be my favorite book on discipleship. So I came to this book (the first time and the second) with both high expectations and a good grasp on what I'd be getting.

Unfortunately, The Great Omission failed to meet those expectations by delivering nothing new from Willard, nothing he hadn't already said in The Divine Conspiracy. This book seems mostly like a Greatest Hits CD, reprising some of his best insights (and even best one-liners) from that earlier work, with little to add. Furthermore, because some of the chapters are taken from previous lectures or papers (i.e. they were not written specifically for this book), the tone and voice varies from chapter to chapter, making for an inconsistent reading experience. As I said before, I think Dallas Willard is great for the most part, yet reading this book for 30 minutes a day felt more like homework than joy.

Here's the deal: I suspect The Great Omission was written/edited as a primer for people who hadn't read anything by Dallas Willard before, that this was intended to be a sort of Dallas Willard 101 course. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a great idea, since reading his whole bibliography would take years. But I think the author and publisher could have done so in a more organized and more original way, and I wish they had. I'll hang onto this book, but doubt I'll pick it up again anytime soon...and if anyone wants to borrow it, I'd recommend just grabbing The Divine Conspiracy instead. 

A GRIEF OBSERVED by C.S. Lewis

You know how there are certain movies/TV shows on Netflix that you want to see eventually, but you're just never in the mood? Documentaries about factory farming, films about child soldiers, miniseries about the Holocaust—you've heard these are objectively good, you mean to get around to them eventually, but when the time comes at the end of a long day to choose between one of these or rewatching The Office for the 7th time...well, you'll get to the heavy stuff eventually. Some day.

That was how I felt about A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis's brief, intimate reflection on his own mourning following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. It's a slim book, something you can get through in an hour if you're a fast reader (in fact, the afterword in my edition is nearly as long as the book itself). But it's sat on my shelf for years now waiting to be read, constantly passed over for something more, well, fun. But after the death of a dear friend and church member this month, I decided it was finally time to see what C.S. Lewis had to say about grief.

The book is laid out in four chapters, although I'm at a loss as to what prompted it to be organized this way, because the book is not nearly as systematic as a typical Lewis offering. Instead, what poured forth from Lewis's pen is an almost rambling series of reflections on the pain of his loss, the theological questions his grief is making him ask, and the simultaneous desire to both honor his late wife and move on with his life apart from her. These reflections, while as intelligent as their author, are more emotional than intellectual—Lewis is not trying to "explain" grief so much as walk through it with the reader by his side.

This is probably my favorite C.S. Lewis nonfiction book, because it contains all those things which people adore about his writing—intelligence, imagination, and a gift for language—without the too-clever-by-half tics that sometimes aggravate me about his other works. This is a C.S. Lewis stripped bare of pretension, dropped from his ivory tower into the mire of mourning, and the reader is better served as a result. Lewis is thoughtful and honest here, and ultimately that vulnerable honesty elevates this book to heights his more famous works (Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, etc.) never quite reached for me. For anyone who's ever lost a loved one, I suspect reading A Grief Observed could be helpful, less for the answers it gives than the questions it asks.

BACK TO BEDROCK: MESSAGES ON OUR HISTORIC BAPTIST FAITH by Paul W. Powell

What makes Baptists unique? I'm sure you could come up with a series of snarky answers (I know I could), but in an age when denominationalism is declining across the board, it is nevertheless a question worth asking. Are all denominations basically the same, as many postulate?

When you get beneath the surface, the answer is no. There are certain beliefs and practices which have historically set Baptists apart from our Methodist, Episcopal, Pentecostal, and Catholic brothers and sisters. In Back to Bedrock, the late Paul Powell, former dean of my beloved Truett Seminary and one of the lights of Texas Baptists life for decades, seeks to explain those Baptist distinctives.

His chosen format, appropriately for a former pastor, is a series of twelve sermons, dealing with everything from what Baptists believe about God and salvation to narrower subjects like stewardship, cooperation between churches, and the role of ministers. Each sermon draws from Scripture, naturally, but also has as its epigraph a quote from the articles of faith and constitution of the first Baptist association in Texas. These historic documents, as well as the minutes from that association's first meeting, the bill of inalienable rights they drafted, their rules of decorum, a table of early church leaders, and a circular letter written by Baylor president and pastor Rufus Burleson are all contained in an appendix at the end of the book.

The messages are trademark Paul Powell: concise, pulled from Scripture, and chock full of stories to help bring the points home. Anyone who reads through these messages, which despite Powell's scholarly credentials are meant for general consumption and not just for academics, will learn a lot about what Baptists believe, why we believe it, and about the individuals who helped form our denomination and its subsequent national, state, and local conventions and associations. For my fellow Baptists, whether you're well schooled in Baptist history or think we date back back to John baptizing in the Jordan (we don't), I happily recommend this book as a primer.

UNDER THE DOME by Stephen King

What if your hometown was suddenly cut off from the rest of the world? That's the premise of this 2009 novel from Stephen King: in an instant and without warning, an impenetrable dome materializes over the small Maine town of Chester's Mill, with no one able to get in or out. In no time at all the institutions, laws, and people begin to change, and what was once a sleepy burb becomes an apocalyptic nightmare.

Imagine Lord the Flies but with adults, and that's what you get from Under the Dome, a parable about the dangers of humanity when our better angels are cast aside. The local used car dealer and town selectman becomes a Hitlerian tyrant, the short order cook at the diner becomes a colonel, the police force is transformed into thuggish stormtroopers, and a local meth lab becomes an Armaggedon-like battle scene...all because the checks and balances of normal society are removed by the dome.

It all makes for an endlessly interesting story, told with Stephen King's typical brilliance for pacing, characterization, and plot. Still pigeonholed in the popular imagination as a horror writer, this book is a reminder of what his fans already knew: Stephen King is a gripping storyteller in any genre. Clocking in at a hefty 1,074 pages, I raced through Under the Dome and could have read another 500 pages without complaint.

Is it perfect? Nah—sometimes King's writing is clever to the point of self-indulgent, sometimes his characters talk like the witty voice in his head instead of like real people, and almost all the characters are one-dimensional good guys or bad guys. But none of these criticisms make the book any less fun to read. Under the Dome is a great story told well, and for anyone looking for a fun summer read, I'd point you here without reservation.