radical amazement

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.”