Last week I finished up the course work for a Master’s
degree in Pastoral Studies. Over three years I took classes in scripture,
systemic and historical theology, pastoral skills, and worship and liturgy. I
was blessed to take classes with professors and students from a variety of
faith traditions. More importantly my conception of “God” expanded.
As did my bookshelves.
Although I have shelves full of many more titles
(and notebooks with TBR titles scribbled in the margins), here are four that
stood out during my time at Seattle University.
Models
of God by Sallie McFague
“God is incarnated or embodied in our world, in both
cosmological and anthropological ways. The implication of this picture is that
we never meet God unmediated or unembodied.”
Radical
Amazement by Judy Cannato
“Our vitality depends on the connections we
establish and the communion we share.”
The Bible
Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher
Silberman
“The Hebrew Bible would offer an unparalleled source
of solidarity and identity to countless communities in the centuries that
followed. The details of its stories, drawn from a treasury of ancient
memories, fragmentary histories, and rewritten legends, possessed power not as
an objective chronicle of events in a tiny land on the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean but as a timeless expression of what a people’s divine destiny
might be.”
The
Powers that Be by Walter Wink
“God at one and the same time upholds a given
political or economic system, since some such system is required to support
human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of fully human
life; and presses forth for its transformation into a more humane order. Conservatives
stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The
Christian is expected to hold together all three.”
