Here are four of my favorite reads from 2021:
Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser Little, Brown Spark 2020).
To be honest, I read a lot and very little this year. I was constantly bouncing from ebook to audiobook, to which I then listened myself to sleep and woke up with the author still droning on, and then ordered a hard copy, which sat on my shelf with the spine staring me down as I went to sleep again. But in a way, this was the perfect book for imperfect perusal. I found it as I was stumbling around looking for things to help fill time in my high school English class, and along the way help my students become better writers. Roy Peter Clark connected with me because he, like me, wants to take it all in -- all the best manuals on good writing -- and then give just a sampling of what he liked about each.
Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It's Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature While Remaining Emotionally Immature (Zondervan, updated edition 2017).
I read this one in the context of a men's recovery group. I wasn't sure about the title -- it sounded suspiciously like "Softsoap for soft skinᵗᵐ". And we had just finished reading Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, which had been a mix of strategies to avoid people-pleasing and individualistic '90s self-empowerment talk wrapped in the fig leaves of Bible verses. But one day, on a bus ride from Vancouver down to Southwest Portland, I listened to the first few chapters of EHS and was quite surprised: this guy knew his Bible, not just to proof-text, but even to give the historical context of the book of Revelation in the persecutions and temptations to compromise in the face of the Roman empire. He disarmed me by recounting his own mistakes and walking me through the kitchen to see how his thinking had developed from those mistakes to the point of writing the book from the lessons he'd learned. And finally, he evaded the charge of faddish pop-psychology by quoting from the church fathers and pulling things from all eras of church history, especially the idea of the Sabbath rest as applied by the monastics. This historical grounding and deep knowledge of scripture helped me trust the samplings of wisdom he offered on going deeper with God by dealing with past trauma, listening to God regularly, and establishing healthy daily routines. The book comes with two companion volumes: a book of questions for daily reflection and a book of twice-a-day silent periods of stillness before God interspersed with readings for meditation. This meant for a workout, but it was a good routine to follow and I learned a lot.
Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (Zondervan, enlarged edition 2016).
I listened to this one on Audible while driving the 30 minutes to and from work. It's a short listen; only about four hours. I'm not sure I caught all of it, because the speaker in my phone wasn't loud enough over the rough stretch of I-205 between Salmon Creek and Portland. But what I did get was enough to tell that Wesley Hill is sincere, and that he wants to be faithful to God amidst his struggles with sexuality. I identified a lot with his story. (He struggles with same-sex attraction; I struggle with bisexual attraction and intrusive thoughts of gender dysphoria.) I was encouraged by his stories of how he was helped by friends and mentors at church and college, by the testimonies of others similarly-afflicted such as Henri Nouwen and Gerard Manley-Hopkins, and by his martyr's resolve that even if his desires don't change, he can serve Christ and the church through his patient endurance in struggling through loneliness to keep killing sin and to hold onto God and his people. He doesn't take the easy way out, and that makes his book the more beautiful.
Aminta Arrington, Songs of the Lisu Hills: Practicing Christianity in Southwest China (Penn State, 2020).
I'm not sure if I read this book all the way through, but I did look closely at the author's PhD dissertation from Biola, as well as every single one of her published articles on the subject leading up to this monograph. She's that good. She started out as a foreign teacher at universities in Shandong and Beijing, and somehow came down to Yunnan to visit the Lisu and write her dissertation on them, a people group who are still practicing the Christianity they learned from early-20th-century missionaries: from the China Inland Mission, James Outram Fraser, Allyn and Leila Cooke, John and Isobel Kuhn, and others; from the Pentecostals and Assemblies of God, Alfred and Mary Lewer, James Clifford Morrison and his wife Lavada, Leonard Bolton, etc.; and from the Churches of Christ, Justin Russell Morse and his wife Gertrude and their sons Eugene, Robert, and LaVerne, as well as other colleagues such as Isabel Maxey Dittemore and Dorothy Sterling. The history of religion among the Lisu and their neighbors the Rawang is a special interest of mine, and Arrington fills in an important gap, showing from interviews what happened on the China side of Lisuland after Communism took over: how during persecution they buried their Bibles and rarely met to sing hymns, and consequently their faith lay dormant, but after they were again allowed to congregate in the 1980s, their faith was rekindled as they became active in fellowship and singing once again.
