(Not) A Book Recommendation
What’s on your must-read list right now?
This is an impossible question for me to answer. While I’m proud to share that the shelf of 2019 have-reads is fairly deep so far, my pile of books-to-get-around-to continues to grow. The deeper I dive into the world of women in the Bible, the more thinkers I discover. The more I learn, the more I realize I still have yet to learn.
One. Day. At. A. Time.
I did just move one book from stack A to B—Carl R. Trueman’s Histories and Falacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History, and while I LOVED his work (despite not understanding a solid 10% of the terminology), I am not going to recommend it to you. Well, to most of you, anyway.
Here is a list of people who should read this book:
Pastors and teachers trying to bring life to Biblical narrative
History teachers and enthusiasts
Anyone with a fascination of Marxism and the bizarre trend of Holocaust denial
The rest of you should probably pass.
This non-recommendation is really a lament. It represents the devastating truth of learning for me—recognizing that I am a finite human with an exceptionally finite amount of reading time. There is a cap to my capacity. Family, work, chores, staying connected with friends, serving at church—they all deserve more of my time than personal, even spiritually motivated, pursuits. It’s easy to misalign our callings in life when the desires of our heart have their way. But if Jeremiah is to be trusted, I have to remember that my heart often leads me astray. I have to re-align my schedule according to God’s priorities. Although I must say, when I find that my reading serves one of them, it is a special delight.
But the problem with some books (and often this includes the ones that I personally adore) is that they won’t be relevant for everyone. There will be books that don’t make the cut. Sometimes, you will have to say no to another person’s must read.
So, since most of you will not have time to fit in Histories and Fallacies for yourself, I will leave you with this nugget:
“In short, I believe we have a choice. We can ignore history, and thus doom ourselves to understanding our own small world as reflecting nature, just the way things are, and by so doing doom ourselves to be enslaved to the forces around us that remain unseen but which nonetheless exert a powerful pressure on us. Or we can study history, and in so doing, simultaneously relativize ourselves and our times and, ironically, somewhat liberate ourselves in such a way that we understand more of our world and how we fit into it. Only the man who knows the forces that shape the way he thinks is capable of resisting those forces; and history is a great help in identifying and exposing such hidden things.”