As I prepare to go on vacation in July, not only am I making my reservations and making lists of the various types of clothes I’ll need, I’m also collecting books!
I collect and read a wide variety of topics because all of it informs my preaching.
Some books help me grow as a person.
Some help me revel and delight in God’s creation and humans’ imaginations.
Some help me better organize my life.
And all good writing, regardless of genre, helps me grow in my craft.
Here’s what’s on my summer reading list*.
I hope you’ll tell me what’s on yours.
Angels of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Charles Henry Rowell, ed.
Amanda Gorman, the U.S. inaugural poet in 2021, says she loves poetry because she sees it as “the language and dialect of the people.”
One of her favorite poetry books is this anthology that contextualizes the political and social landscape for Black poets over a two hundred year period.
From the book jacket’s description:
This is not just another poetry anthology. It is a gathering of poems that demonstrate what happens when writers in a marginalized community collectively turn from dedicating their writing to political, social, and economic struggles, and instead devote themselves to the art of their poems and to the ideas they embody. These poets bear witness to the interior landscapes of their own individual selves or examine the private or personal worlds of invented personae and, therefore, of human beings living in our modern and postmodern worlds.
I just ordered my copy and can’t wait for it to arrive.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
This is a re-read for me.
I listened to the audio version several years ago while driving and was fascinated.
Trouble was, I couldn’t take notes while I was driving so never applied what I learned. “Cognitive bias” that the author explains, plays into everything we do—including the ways we interpret Scripture—so it’s an important topic to revisit.
From the book’s description:
In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.
System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.
Along the lines of taking notes, here’s a book I read in the last year that I’m re-reading again right now because it’s so valuable.
How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens.
Alas, I’m disappointed this book came out only in 2017, because if I’d had this book when I began preaching decades ago, my sermon notes would be the envy of preachers everywhere!
Taking notes doesn’t do us any good if we don’t know how to apply or find them again.
Not only will you learn how to stores notes retrievably, this book teachers you how to take notes so usefully that a sermon is practically written for you when you go back to look at your notes even years later.
Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
I’ve recommended this book before but it’s so important it deserves to be recommended again.
My repeated refrain while reading it? “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
Well, now I do and we all need to.
In addition, Wilkerson is a masterful nonfiction word crafter. You’ll learn as much about organization, transitions, storytelling, and empathetic writing as you will about living in America while Black.
Story or Die: How to Use Brain Science to Engage, Persuade, and Change Minds in Business and in Life by Lisa Cron
This is required reading for our preachers in the Backstory Preaching Mentorship, and I tell anyone who will listen: this is essential reading for the human race.
People are saved by stories. That’s what happens every time we preach. We tell the saving narrative of Jesus Christ.
People also die by them. Misinformation, when offered in ways the brain recognizes as a story, sounds and feels credible.
When those false narratives are spread via social media and become echo chambers and conspiracy theories, countless people act on it and die as a result.
The way through? The way back? Telling true stories in a way that subverts the false ones.
Cron’s book presents my first glimmer of hope for a way forward—and adds gravitas to the life and death importance of our preaching.
The Sympathizer: A Novel (2016) and the sequel, The Committed (2021) by Viet Thanh Nguyen
I learned of The Committed earlier this year when I heard an interview with Nguyen on National Public Radio. I was so taken with the story of this Vietnamese spy that I wanted to get the whole story so began with the first volume.
I’m half-way through the Pulitzer-prize winning The Sympathizer and am reading it slowly so I can savor every bit of it, luxuriating in the knowledge that there’s another whole book right behind it.
Told in the first person by a Vietnamese national, the two books take place in Vietnam, California, and France, combining thriller, betrayal, love, loss, and historical fiction of the Vietnam War era and after with exquisite writing.
Notice how much the reader is teased into wondering about the character from the first line of The Sympathizer: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.”
Read good writing and we become better writers—and preachers—ourselves.
Head to the Amazon website to read the first few sample pages and maybe you’ll get just as hooked on it as I am.
And finally, I am so excited about the new “Preaching, And…” series generated by the Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence.
The series brings homileticians with experts from other fields to bring fresh insights and practical tips to preachers.
Preaching and the Thirty-Second Commerical: Lessons from Advertising for the Pulpit by O. Wesley Allen, Jr., and Carrie LaFerle.
From the book jacket:
At first glance, preaching and advertising seem worlds apart from one another. One tries to proclaim love of God and neighbor; the other tries to sell you something that you may or may not need. Yet both must compete with other ways we receive and process information in an increasingly distracted world. While most of the time preaching simply tries to muddle through this situation, advertising knows that it must continually relearn how to reclaim its audience's attention–and keep it.
Believing that preaching can benefit from advertising's laser focus on how to make its message stick, O. Wesley Allen, Jr. (a preaching professor) and Carrie La Ferle (a professor of advertising) have written this first-of-its-kind book on what preachers can learn from advertising.
I’m so excited about this series that I immediately sent Dr. Allen an email requesting that he be our Collective+ guest lecturer in September, and he graciously agreed. We’ll see him on September 9th to talk about this book and other Preaching And… books we have to look forward to!
*A small percentage of each purchase goes to Backstory Preaching. Thanks for supporting our ministry!