Taking Off and Landing

Every so often, I’ll update this with a few titles and names, just to give you an idea of what I’ve been whittling my eyes down to bloody nubs on. What’s here is both to give you an idea what I’m turning over in my studies, but also to give some suggestions of what I’ve found to be the good stuff.

First things first:

River Teeth, by David James Duncan. He’s one of my new all-time favorite authors. There’s no way to encapsulate his writing style except to say that it’s somewhere between Annie Dillard and Robert Pirsig with F. Scott Fitzgerald as an uncle. I read his first two novels and couldn’t believe that something this good was on paper. Easy to read, but digestion is a slow process. A collection of short stories and vignettes, some true, mostly not.

Confession time: I didn’t know what I was missing during college. As an English major, I was trained to love things like Thomas Hardy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, but for different reasons. I’m coming back to find that I love Hemmingway and Salinger, but still can’t embrace Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen. Life’s too short. Post-college, I picked up a copy of The Long Walk, and was flabbergasted. Needful Things is one of my new favorites because of the ominous and deeply theological way that King is able to dissect the nature of evil and the way in which evil walks among us. Amazing. This man knows his theology. Seriously. No, no, stop laughing; I mean it.

For an easy to read, well-written introduction to the issues of how we speak about God, this is the place to start. It cuts through the muddle of Gadamer and Wittgenstein, and goes step-by-step through the collapse of religious language in the 20th century, and the attempts to put it back together again. You’re shaking your head…let’s try it this way. When I say “God”, how do you know that what I mean and what you mean are the same thing? How can two people communicate if they mean slightly different things? Does that mean that the thing they’re speaking of doesn’t exist? Not necessarily, and Stiver does a good job of putting it all together.

I told you I was a geek. You didn’t believe me, but I told you.

More to come…