What I am reading these days

In case you are curious, this is what I am reading right now. What I read often impacts what I am thinking about and subsequently writing about.

I started rereading through Joshua last night with my wife. It is a book I need to spend more time in, which is probably true of most of the Old Testament.

I am very slowly reading through Joseph Hellerman’s When The Church Was A Family. I know I have mentioned that before and it is taking me a very long time to get through. I only read small bits at a time because it seems that every time I read a few pages I get caught up in a train of thought that derails my reading. I am not sure I have read a book in the last few years that has provoked more thought and that has really slowed me down. It is already heavily dogeared. I plan on reading it again in six months, it should be a quicker read after I have finished it once and noodled it over.

The other book I am reading is a quicker read. Even at 300+ pages, if I really buckled down I could probably read it in a day. Written by Lisa M. Hamilton, the book is titled Deeply Rooted and it chronicles the pretty mundane lives of modern farmers who have eschewed the “bigger is better” model of modern agribusiness and opted for smaller scale farming. It is a touch preachy with the obligatory references to the standard targets of agribusiness (i.e Monsanto) but so far it has been a great read, very inspiring. Food is a choice. Not merely which store we shop at and which brand of cereal we buy but a real choice of how and what we eat and where it comes from. We are nowhere near where I would like to be as a family but that is our goal, a self-supporting and healthier food choice as a family.

I should have these finished pretty shortly and I already have my next Amazon gift card on the way. On tap for my reading pleasure are two more books. One is Your Church Is Too Small which comes highly recommended by a number of sources. The other is The Naked Anabaptist which looks at the principles of Anabaptist thought without some of the cultural traditions that surround how it normally is manifested. In other words, how do we apply the core values of Anabaptism without being Mennonite or Amish? Looks like a good book that fits well with what I am thinking about. You can be sure to hear about both of those books when they arrive.