Some recent reading

Shamelessly plagiarized from my Goodreads page:

Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin

A vivid, searing exploration of religious, racial, sexual, and individual identity. An American classic.

Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

A very different book from Go Tell It On the Mountain, but still occupied with the nature of the self, its desires, and its self-deceptions.

Looking through the Cross: The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book of 2014, Graham Tomlin

Nothing particularly ground-breaking, but a sound and edifying set of meditations on how Christians should approach power, suffering, ambition, failure, reconciliation, and other areas of life, informed by a Luther-esque “theology of the cross.”

Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement, Paul Fiddes

I’m not sure I’m fully convinced by Fiddes’ preference for “subjective” accounts of the atonement, but this is a helpful study of how the major models of how the cross saves (sacrifice, victory, love, etc.) can still speak to us.

I’ve just started reading, at the recommendation of Alastair Roberts, Moshe Halbertal’s On Sacrifice. I’m not very far into it, but it already promises to be quite good.

Read anything good lately?