This has been a finishing week, book-wise.

First up was Douglas Farrow‘s little A Nation of Bastards. Not being Canadian, many of the references were foreign to my experience. I do see plenty of rejection of marriage as a stable institution. Much better, like everything else in our society, to just make up as we go along. His Ascension and Theology also looks interesting.

Second, was Peter Scazzero‘s The Emotionally Healthy Church. Sure sounds like a good idea to pay attention to the emotional elements in the work of making (and being) a disciple. Being more of a thinking type, I know I’ve neglected it too much.

Third, tonight’s finish, was Kenda Creasy Dean‘s Almost Christian, a stydy of ways the church is implicated in and might go beyond the Moralistic Therapeautic Deism described in Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I know I want nothing to do with MTD, but as a (nearly) life-long inhabitant of consumeristic, individualistic culture, it’s tough to completely evade its tentacles.

There are some I’m still working on. First is Pierre Manent’s, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, tracing the tradition from the medieval era through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and so on. I’ve read as far as the chapter on Rousseau. He brings in much more of the political theory of these folks than I’ve read before, so it’s helpful. And no, what he means by “liberalism” is not what most folks in America mean by liberalism these days. The liberalism here in view is the radical individualism and emphasis on rights that lies beneath both what we call liberals and conservatives, though they play different variations on the theme.

For something completely different, I’m also reading Dee Hock’s One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization. He’s one of those fellows I kept hearing Len Sweet talk about, so I thought I should get around to reading him.

Slower reads that I’m still working on include D. Stephen Long’s Speaking of God and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. And I’ll also be starting Daniel Bell’s Just War as Christian Discipleship.

And then I read some easy fiction for my down time.

Anyone out there reading something I might like?