Brad East, with an intriguing comment in the midst of his review of Ryan Burge’s new book:

As for how Christians should respond to this fresh mission field, that is the question of the hour. If any tradition could make serious inroads with working-class young men and two-shift single moms, that mythical American phenomenon—revival—would surely be afoot.

Currently reading: Forgive by Timothy Keller 📚

Currently reading: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 📚

This post (via @Jonah) is spot on: Another Bible Study Night Will Fix It… Really???? It’s ludicrous to think that more church programming and structured gatherings will lead to the kind of organic outcomes that many of us are striving for. In discipleship (as in so much of life), the means and the ends are so closely related that it’s nearly impossible—and certainly inadvisable—to try to pull them apart.

Finished reading: The Big Relief by David Zahl 📚

I don’t know if there’s a person writing at the moment who’s better at “popularizing”—meant in the best possible sense—rich theological concepts and making them intellectually and emotionally digestible than David Zahl. Some part of The Big Relief would catch any person up in its net eventually, if they let themselves be caught.

Interior with Young Man Reading (1898) by Vilhelm Hammershøi:

(featured on the cover of The Edge of Words by Rowan Williams)

What our 4th of July celebration looked like (yes, that’s me jumping the firework)

Finished reading: Untamed Hospitality (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life) by Elizabeth Newman 📚

A rich and thought-provoking account of Christian hospitality. Newman excels at unearthing the political and economic assumptions that shape how we interact with—and construct!—the world around us. One of the great strengths of Untamed Hospitality—and also a lingering weakness throughout—is Newman’s broad understanding of hospitality. She describes hospitality as both “practice” (a complex and corporate activity done across time that aims for certain goods) and “theory” (a way of being in space and time). At its widest descriptive point, Newman says that hospitality “names our participation in the life of God” (13). This capacious understanding means that diverse phenomena all fall within the purview of hospitality—worship, in particular, takes a leading role. The positive side of this is that hospitality is given rather thick conceptual and theological description. The drawback is that the book operates at a level of abstraction that is somewhat surprising given the subject matter.