On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers.
I asked Alex Fogleman—professor at Trinity Anglican Seminary and author of Making Disciples: Catechesis in History, Theology, and Practice—about what’s on his bedside table, his favorite fiction, the books he regularly revisits, and more.
What’s on your nightstand right now?
Right now, I have David Brooks’s How to Know a Person, which is as much about perception and attention as it is about relationships. I also have Josef Pieper’s Happiness and Contemplation. I love Pieper’s writing, especially Leisure: The Basis of Culture, but I just discovered this little book, and it’s a gem—also on the ways that love and attention are bound up with each other. Really quite good.
Then there’s a little volume called Reading Greek with the Desert Fathers by Timothy Brady. Because who wouldn’t want to start or end the day with a little monastic Greek? Seriously, though, it’s one of the best little anthologies for anyone with a year of New Testament Greek and wanting a deeper plunge. It’s been a great way to keep up some daily Greek while also imbibing spiritually edifying wisdom.
Finally, I’ve got my friend Thomas Breedlove’s new book, A Phenomenology of the Divine Image, which is a profound meditation on the image of God and human finitude. You might not think of a book on Gregory of Nyssa and French phenomenology as bedtime reading, but the first sentence of the book, I kid you not, is “Macrina was dying.” Talk about a page-turner!
What are your favorite fiction books?
Being from the South, I’ve almost always loved Flannery O’Connor’s works: the The Complete Stories, for sure, but also her novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. I say “almost” because at first I was completely mystified by her writing. Through Ralph Wood, though, I gradually learned to see what was happening. His Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is an excellent introduction to reading O’Connor.
More recently, my family has introduced me to several other great fiction books. I’ll just mention Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga, about which I’d agree with the audacious claims of those who rank it with the Narniad. I’d even concur with Tom Ward that it offers an even more deeply Christian picture of the gospel’s victory.
I’d even concur with Tom Ward that The Wingfeather Saga offers an even more deeply Christian picture of the gospel’s victory.
Many of my favorite fiction books, though, are those recommended to me by my friend Paul Gutacker. Paul is one of those people who not only loves good books of all kinds but also is a truly convivial reader. Over the years, this has led to a lovely list of some of my favorite books: Adam Roberts’s Kantian sci-fi The Thing Itself and Hegelian The This, Christopher Beha’s Augustinian The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, Daniel Nayeri’s whirlwind Everything Sad Is Untrue, Eugene Vodolazkin’s everywhere-all-at-once Laurus, and Francis Spufford’s alternative history detective thriller Cahokia Jazz. I look forward to whatever Paul recommends next.
What biographies or autobiographies have most influenced you and why?
I don’t read a ton of biographies, admittedly. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a biography of Lincoln or Roosevelt or any military hero. I do like books about artists, though. I mentioned Ralph Wood’s work on O’Connor, and I’d also add here the edited volume of her correspondence, The Habit of Being. Not only does it offer a unique window into her world, but it contains some of the flat-out funniest writing I’ve ever read.
I’ve also had a longtime fascination with Bob Dylan, and his Chronicles well portrays his allusive and enigmatic life. I wouldn’t have said it like this when I first read it, but there’s something deeply figural about Dylan. Like a good apophatic theologian, he eludes precise, pinned-down observation while drawing the listener to the deeper mystery of things. He’s kept me away from more than a few false idols.
More confidently, I can commend some ancient biographical works like Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Saint Macrina, and Augustine’s Confessions in this category. They’d hardly count as biographies today, but they do afford, I think, a powerful instance of what we often seek in biographies: a way of looking at the world in which we learn to perceive things more like what they really are—as reflections of divine glory.
What are some books you regularly reread and why?
The book with the most underlining and finger-smears is Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology. To me, it’s one of the most profound meditations on what Eliot names as the “dissociation of sensibility” in the modern world between intellect and affect, truth and aesthetics, and theology and spirituality. It’s about culture and the transformation of knowledge in the modern period, particularly the reliance on method as the only legitimate form of knowing. It’s also about language, pedagogy, culture, tradition, and liturgy—all of which goes into a book on “the nature of theology.”
Louth ultimately mounts a defense of patristic allegory, but the way he gets there is through an epic foray into modern thought. The retrieval of patristic exegesis is hard-won, coming only after seriously grappling with Vico, Gadamer, Heidegger, Polanyi, Torrance, Barth, and many others. It’s also beautifully lyrical. One of the back blurbs simply says, “Louth writes like an angel.” So it’s got that going for it.
What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others for the sake of the gospel?
Early on, it was Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy and a host of Eugene Peterson books, especially Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eat This Book, and The Contemplative Pastor. These books provided an essential framework for seeing the gospel as intrinsic to ordinary life, and I also learned from them a patient devotion to Scripture and the voice of the Spirit.
J. I. Packer and Gary Parrett’s Grounded in the Gospel clarified my vocation as a theologian-catechist. That book—and Packer’s ministry more generally—voiced the urgent need for recovering of catechesis. They write, “Where wise catechesis has flourished, the church has flourished. Where it has been neglected, the church has floundered.” I put that on a coffee mug one time, but my wife didn’t like seeing the word “floundered” when drinking coffee, so I have a new mug now that just has the first sentence.
Finally, the writings of Hans Boersma have influenced my theology most of all. I studied with him in seminary and he’s continued to be a generous friend and mentor. His books Heavenly Participation, Seeing God, Scripture as Real Presence, Pierced by Love, and many others have been consistent tutors in how to seek the face of Christ in the Scriptures, the church, and all of creation. Hans is mostly known as a strident champion of the Christian Platonist tradition and its metaphysical realism, with which I’m in total agreement. But I’ve learned as much from him about loving God, reading Scripture, and belonging to the church.
What’s one book you wish every pastor would read?
Every pastor should read—must read—Augustine’s Instructing Beginners in Faith, and probably right now. I like Raymond Canning’s translation, but others work well, too. I can rarely get through an article or talk without that text somewhere in the background. It’s short but contains in nuce an entire world of biblical, theological, and pastoral wisdom.
The premise is that a nearby pastor named Deogratias writes to Augustine with a confession: His catechesis is utterly boring. He’s stuck and doesn’t know what to do, so he asks the great orator Augustine how to teach the Bible and encourage people in the faith. Augustine obliges these technical requests, but he then redirects Deogratias to the heart of the issue. The most important thing, he counsels Deogratias, is to learn to teach with joy. And at the heart of joy is God’s persistent abiding love for the church made known in Christ. It’s just. So. Good.
What’s your best piece of writing advice?
Embrace the discomfort and tedium of editing and kill your darlings. I know some people think first, then write, but if you write in order to think, you’ll have to get used to rewriting and editing and then rewriting some more. And you’ll have to say goodbye to some dear, precious little sentences. I create a separate draft for these darlings, so I don’t have to feel like I actually kill them. They live on a special file on my computer, blissfully unaware of the final drafts to which they’ll never belong. I’m sure God still loves them.
Embrace the discomfort and tedium of editing and kill your darlings.
Finding the right words is largely intuitive, and the more you read other good writers in your discipline, the better your ear for good prose will be. I learned a lot from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, but I’ve learned as much by imitating my favorite theologians, like Hans Boersma and D. H. Williams. I started to pay attention not only to the content but also to the form of their sentences, how they structured paragraphs and sections, how they engaged with sources and texts.
This doesn’t always work, though—or it does, just not in a positive way. I realized at times I was trying to sound like someone I’d been reading, like N. T. Wright, and ended up just sounding awful. Nonetheless, I’d still maintain that writing, like other work, is best learned through apprenticeship—but there’s a good amount of trial and error. The key though, is that we don’t find our “authentic voice” by trying to be an individual. We find it through humbly joining the conversation we’ve been invited into. In this way, you might even say there’s an ecclesiology of writing. (I don’t know about that last sentence though; might be a darling with a death warrant.)
What are you learning about life and following Jesus?
Life is hard and following Jesus is harder. I thought both would get easier, but, curiously, they haven’t. I’m the kind of person who likes being liked, and likes being liked for being good at things. I’m learning that Jesus’s love is better than being liked; that the gospel is better news than I thought, but it also kills your idols; and that the church really is the body of Christ, which for all its cuts and tears is the crazy way God is saving the world.
