You may be wondering where the heck Hannah and I have gotten off to…or perhaps you’re just relieved that our blog posts haven’t been inundating your FB feeds for the past month or so. As it turns out I was asked at the 11th hour to teach a summer course in July so I have been busy creating lectures, teaching, grading, and meeting with students for the past month. (Oh and also going on family vacation for a week.) Needless to say, I am now being trounced in our little Book War.
So, while I am irritated at myself for getting behind in The Book War, I am also realizing that I actually read quite a bit in July…just not in the form of books. Which leads me to, “Oh, the many ways we read!” While Hannah and I are obviously book lovers, as a society we read in various ways and with each new generation we create even more ways and modes of reading. This past month I read approx. 20-25 texts which exemplify the themes I taught in my class. I did not assign a single ‘book’ but my students had a text to read each and every day of class. These were short essays, articles, sections of longer books, chapters from books, short stories, theological documents (I teach Theology 1000: Faith, Reason, and Culture to underclass students at Villanova University,) historical writings, philosophical treatises…the list goes on. The point being, that books are simply one way in which we read. So while I cannot add any books to my Book War list for the past month, here is a list of everything that I read in July.
Armstrong, Karen. The Myth of Religious Violence (article)
Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus: Workers in the Vineyard, The Lost Sheep, The Lost Coin (sections of a book)
The Martyrdom of Perpetua (historical document)
The Martyrdom of Polycarp (historical document)
Religions of Rome: A Sourcebook (selections written by Tacitus, Pliny, Origen, Minucius Felix)
St. Augustine, On Baptism, chapters 1-5 and 18-19 (theological letter)
Gonzalez, Justo. The History of Christianty, chapters 16, 17, 24, 26, 28, and 31 (text book)
Four Accounts of the First Crusade (multiple authors’ historical account of the First Crusade)
Luther, Small Catechism and Ninety-five Theses (theological works)
Convents Confront the Reformation (Letter written by one nun concerning her leaving the convent)
Locke, A Discourse of Miracles (philosophical text)
Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (philosophical letter)
Gaudium et Spes Sections 23-45 (document from the Second Vatican Council concerning ecumenism)
Milne, No Promised Land: Rejecting the Authority of the Bible (chapter from a larger book on feminist theology)
DuBois, W.E.B. The Gospel According to Mary Brown (a brief re-imagining of the Christ story published in 1919)
Chiang, Story of Your Life (short story)
Read on my friends!