Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness - (Eugene H. Peterson) In this book Peterson clarifies the pastoral vocation by turning to the book of Jonah, in which he finds a captivating, subversive story that can help pastors recover their "vocational holiness". Peterson probes the spiritual dimensions of the pastoral calling and seeks to reclaim the ground taken over by those who are trying to enlist pastors in religious careers.

===

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Parker J. Palmer). The old Quaker adage, "Let your life speak," spoke to author Parker J. Palmer when he was in his early 30s. It summoned him to a higher purpose, so he decided that henceforth he would live a nobler life. "I lined up the most elevated ideals I could find and set out to achieve them," he writes. "The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque.... I had simply found a 'noble' way of living a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart." Thirty years later, Palmer now understands that learning to let his life speak means "living the life that wants to live in me." It involves creating the kind of quiet, trusting conditions that allow a soul to speak its truth. It also means tuning out the noisy preconceived ideas about what a vocation should and shouldn't be so that we can better hear the call of our wild souls. There are no how-to formulas in this extremely unpretentious and well-written book, just fireside wisdom from an elder who is willing to share his mistakes and stories as he learned to live a life worth speaking about. --Gail Hudson

===

Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. (Kenneth L. Smith, Ira G. Zepp). Search for the Beloved Community examines the thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the influences that shaped it. Late co-author Kenneth L. Smith was one of King's seminary professors. His firsthand knowledge of King's seminary studies provides the background for an incisive analysis of the influences of the Christian tradition and of Mahatma Gandhi upon this outstanding leader.

===

Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (Grace Elizabeth Hale). First-timer Hale's impressive examination of the Jim Crow Southan erudite intellectual survey of the sweeping social, historical, and economic trends that shaped white racial identity in opposition to blacknessis obscured by deadly academic jargon. The central myth Hale debunks is that whiteness is an organic, rather than manufactured, racial identitythat it is, somehow, the American norm. She identifies several large cultural forces that influenced white racial identity. The replacement of local merchandise with a national mass market, for example, gave rise to advertising (much of it created in the North) that manipulated southerners' nostalgic remembrance of loyal, subservient slaves by using African-American icons like Aunt Jemima to sell goods to a nationwide audiencepresumed to be entirely white. Advances in printing technology made it easier to distribute demeaning images of African-Americans, reinforcing negative stereotypes. Just as black racial identity was largely defined in relation to whiteness after Reconstruction, Hale asserts, whiteness was defined by blackness. Analyzing how whites of different economic and educational backgrounds shared a unified sense of supremacy, she fleshes out Ralph Ellison's famous declaration: ``Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes.'' But in place of Ellison's simple eloquence, Hale raises an impenetrable thicket of theoretical jargon (terms like transhistorical, isomorphic, and dialectics rain like candy from a Mardi Gras float). She glosses the Civil War's outcome thus: ``Union victory delegitimated that nascent nationalist collectivity, the Confederacy.'' Furthermore, her contention that ``this corresponding depth of racial obsession occurred only with passing'' for African-Americans spectacularly understates the totality with which whites controlled black life during Jim Crow's dark reign. One senses in Hale's (American History/Univ. Of Virginia) cogent, encyclopedic scholarship the debut of an important new intellectual voiceall the more reason to regret the cloaking of provocative thinking in the fusty duds of academic prose. (8 pages b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

===

Introduction to the Bible, An (Christian E Hauer, William A Young). An Introduction To The Bible approaches the Bible by considering it from three different 'worlds'-- literary, historical, and contemporary worlds. This unique approach underscore the dynamics of each of world and the methods scholars have developed to study them. The authors are especially careful to distinguish the historical and literary worlds for readers new to the discipline. Readers are also encouraged to consider and discuss the contemporary significance of the Bible.

===

Praying Shapes Believing: A Theological Commentary on the Book of Common Prayer (Leonel L. Mitchell). Mitchell's basic assumption is the old "lex orandi lex credendi" proviso: how we pray influences what we believe. Since the Book of Common Prayer is the center of how Episcopalians corporately pray, it follows that an examination of it can reveal the theology to which it gives rise. Looking at every aspect of the Book of Common Prayer, Mitchell examines the connection between liturgy, scripture, prayer, and theology. The examination is thorough, running through the liturgical calendar, the Great Vigil, baptism, Holy Eucharist, pastoral offices, and ordinations.

===

... and several 80-pg long study-booklets (plus the respective Biblical books) here: http://www.gcfweb.org/institute/index.php

===

It's all college-level reading that I chose for fun (not because assigned). Also a couple of concurrent audiobooks from Librivox.

~Susan