2022 Top Book List
I am always surprised by the books that end up on this list. They tend not to be the ones that solely stretched my brain, but rather those that also pierced my heart. When a text can accomplish both of these results, head and heart, I am satisfied that my whole person has been fed. I am always grasping for sentences, phrases, words. Words I can think and feel deeply. It is one of the greatest mysteries of the human experience that our species alone can be scared by words, moved to tears by words, inspired to great courage by words, etc. No other living thing on the planet stares at little scribbles and finds life-changing meaning in them. Yet we spend our lives searching for words that make sense of ourselves, our world, and beyond.
The payoff for life changing words comes at the cost of countless hours. We read hundreds of pages, millions of words for just a sentence or two that hits us hard. Yet we will do this all year and next in search of words that make us feel alive. It is as if we were designed to feed off of phrases and be saved through syllables. It is as if God spoke words to create us and uses words to bring us good news. It is as if the center of reality revolves around a Word who creates and recreates human beings.
There is a peculiar quality to good books that gets life in all of its uncertainty yet is certain that there is an embedded story. Mac Barnett writes:
Lives don’t work the way most books do.
They can end suddenly,
as fast as you kick your leg in the air.
Lives are funny and sad,
scary and comforting,
beautiful and ugly,
but not when they’re supposed to be,
and sometimes all at the same time.
There are patterns in a life,
and patterns in a story,
but in real lives and good stories
the patterns are hard to see,
because the truth is never made of straight lines.
Lives are strange.
We search for stories and sentences that tell us something strange and tell us something true. This is what I experience when I read the story of Jesus. All he says is strange and yet all he says resonates as truth. It is this strange truth that draws me in. When he says, “Come, Follow Me” (Matt. 4:19), what he calls me to seems so bizarre, yet it is so compelling. He is this man that I see dimly, but it's enough to give him everything. I am betting my life on his words. This wager may sound silly, but there is nothing unique about this bet. Make no mistake. We are all betting our life on something. James K.A. Smith and Pascal remind us:
To be human is to be on a quest. To live is to be embarked on a kind of unconscious journey toward a destination of your dreams. As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: "You have to wager. It is not up to you, you are already committed." You can't not bet your life on something. You can't not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for (You Are What You Love).
In hearing Christ’s voice and trusting his message, I am declaring that all my searching, all my seeking, all my digging for words of life is found in his person. I am declaring him the ultimate Word. From this place, I still seek for meaning in the pages I read, but I know what these discoveries ultimately typify: the one who spoke me into being, the one who delivered me through his good news, the only true speech of God, Jesus of Nazareth.
With that said, here are a few favorite books this year that engaged my mind and pierced my heart.
9. The Life of Saint Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa
Most Christians today know little of the great Cappadocian fathers of the 4th century, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil of Caesarea. Even fewer know anything about Saint Macrina, the sister of Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea. These two brothers, titans of Christian history for their theological writing and their pastoral work, were taught in their younger years by their wise and godly older sister, Macrina. Gregory writes this biography of his beloved sister after her death to show the world how much of a light she was. I was moved by how he talks of Macrina and how Macrina lived her life for the “true philosophy,” the gospel of Jesus Christ.
8. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments by Gertrude Himmelfarb
This book’s thesis had the most impact of anything in the category of history I read in 2022. Himmelfarb makes a compelling case that to speak of the enlightenment is naive. There were different shades of what was called “enlightenment” in different contexts with their own distinctive emphases and outcomes. She argues for three enlightenment movements in France, Great Britain, and what would become the United States. How religion, reason, freedom, human depravity, conceptions of justice, and democracy were formulated in each hotbed of enlightenment activity determined the radically different outcomes of each country. This book is a highly accessible analysis of history and extremely stimulating. I highly recommend it.
7. Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction by David Sheff
I first encountered this story in its film adaptation. The movie tells the true story of a top shelf journalist dealing with his son’s drug addiction. It is a story of a lost child and a suffering father each facing down this monster that has changed their lives forever. I was deeply moved by the film; it bluntly depicted the journey of addiction in a way that uncovers the sorrow of millions of addicts and those that love them. After watching the film, I learned it was based on the father’s book narrating these chapters of his life. The book was worth every penny. Hearing a parent detail his agony and rewiring of a new normal called father of an addict was a perspective worth meditating on.
The parents of addicts can be sucked into addiction too. They do not become hooked on drugs. Instead, their child’s drug addiction becomes their obsession. Sheff writes, “Like many in my straits, I became addicted to my child’s addiction.” All mental and emotional energy becomes fixated on the child’s well being. Yet parents don’t have any relief from their pain: “At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.”
No matter how far a child drifts, a parent's love still seeks them out. Sheff explains, “We are connected to our children no matter what. They are interwoven into each cell and inseparable from every neuron. They supersede our consciousness, dwell in our every hollow and cavity and recess with our most primitive instincts, deeper even than our identities, deeper than even our selves.” But a parent cannot live the life of their beloved child for them: “Our children live or die without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating.” Learning to live on this journey of addiction and recovery, relapse and rehabilitation, with a child is a life parents’ did not want, but it is the life that they’ve been given. In this book, Sheff shows “it is possible to love a child who is lost, possibly forever.”
6. The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom by L.S. Dugdale
Dugdale is a physician who explores the process of death in modern society. She finds that patients and doctors have poor frameworks for dealing with this unmovable human experience. After a devastating critique of modernity’s approach to dying, she turns to medieval literature (including Christian literature) to provide the ars moriendi (the art of dying). Our age has not been equipped like times of old for seeing death face to face, so Dugdale searches for older paths of wisdom. These resources of the past get beyond the unsatisfying naturalism offered by modern medicine and the vague spirituality of our culture. Dugdale recognizes the need for a richer prescription for coping with the end of our lives:
One of the problems I often wrestle with as a doctor who interacts with patients in secular health-care settings is whether a nonspecific spirituality suffices to address the existential qualms of patients like Ms. Blatchley. Isn't a fuzzy answer to life's ultimate mysteries akin to wrapping gauze around a gangrenous leg? Others think that a nonspecific spirituality, if anything, should be able to satisfy general existential concerns.
5. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith
I try to read everything James K.A. Smith writes. He always has insights into our cultural moment and fresh prescriptions for swimming upstreams. You are What You Love is one I needed to catch up on before his latest book, How to Inhabit Time, released this year. His aim is to give readers a vision for the liturgies they live out of. By “liturgy,” he means “a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we're for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation.” Our habits are unconsciously forming the story we believe ourselves to be in. This includes secular liturgies. For example:
So if we are unreflectively immersed in the liturgies of consumerism, we will, over time, "learn" that the end goal of human life is acquisition and consumption. "What is the chief end of man?" the consumerist catechism asks. "To acquire stuff with the illusion that I can enjoy it forever.
In the rest of the book, K.A. Smith demonstrates how liturgies of worship can actually reform how we see everything:
Worship works from the top down, you might say. In worship we don't just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn't just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.
4. The Doctrine of the Trinity, Stated and Vindicated by John Gill
I spent a lot of time in this text in 2022. It was a main source of research, the subject of a guided reading group with Dr. Haykin, and a resource to read through with friends wanting to go deeper on the Trinity. In Gill’s day, the doctrine of the Trinity was being questioned and abandoned like wildfire. In this text, Gill sets out to define and defend this doctrine he believed to be the most essential truth of the Christian faith. His exposition of the Trinity continues to be one of the best works on this doctrine in Christian history. Serious exegesis combined with piercing philosophical precision make this a text that holds up today. My favorite sections are his explanation of the eternal generation of the Son and the deity of the Holy Spirit. I will continue to use Gill’s text for teaching readers of all skill levels to grow deeper in an understanding of the triunity of God.
3. A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life by J.I. Packer
There are some books that just burn like fire in your soul when you read them. A Quest for Godliness is one of those books. It contains a collection of writings from J.I. Packer on different facets of Puritan faith and practice. Almost every chapter made me long for eternity, communion with Christ, and a vision for a big God. Chapter 8: “Saved by His Precious Blood”: An Introduction to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ is worth the price of the whole book. Packer unpacks the gospel of the reformed faith. In other words, he unpacks the gospel of the Bible. That chapter is everything I live for and everything I would die for.
One of the lasting impressions of the book is the Puritan awareness of the brevity of life and how that reorients life itself:
Few of us, I think, live daily on the edge of eternity in the conscious way that the Puritans did, and we lose out as a result. For the extraordinary vivacity, even hilarity (yes, hilarity; you will find it in the sources), with which the Puritans lived stemmed directly, I believe, from the unflinching, matter-of-fact realism with which they prepared themselves for death, so as always to be found, as it were, packed up and ready to go. Reckoning with death brought appreciation of each day's continued life, and the knowledge that God would eventually decide, without consulting them, when their work on earth was done brought energy for the work itself while they were still being given time to get on with it.
Another refreshing truth of the Puritan life described by Packer was the grace of the gospel as both the foundation and the engine for striving for godliness:
The supreme ethical motives in Puritanism were gratitude for grace received, and a sense of responsibility to walk worthy of one's calling, and there was not the least room in Puritan teaching for self-righteousness; for not only was it constantly stressed that the Christian works from life, rather than for life, but it was also repeatedly emphasized that our best works are shot through with sin, and contain something that needs to be forgiven.
I have been telling friends recently that Sinclair Ferguson has become my favorite speaker/writer for his ability to prick my heart. The Whole Christ did just that. This book is a wonderful exposition of grace, law, justification, sanctification, union with Christ, and assurance. He specifically hones in on the errors of legalism and antinomianism. Ferguson masterfully deflates these two errors by arguing that they grow from the same root. In fact, “they are non-identical twins from the same womb.” To discover what he means by this, read the book! The key to getting the law and the gospel is see both in light of union with Christ:
The believer never looks at the law without understanding that his relationship to it is the fruit of his union with Christ…The believer has died to the law, but the law does not die. The law still exists to the believer. But united to Christ the believer is now able to fulfill the law of marriage and bear fruit! Thus grace, not law, produces what the law requires; yet at the same time it is what the law requires that grace produces.” I will return to this book again and again throughout my Christian life to be washed over by its truth.
1. Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice by Kent Dunnington
My favorite book of the year was a fascinating analysis of the concept of addiction. In this book, the difficult category of addiction is explored from an underdeveloped angle, namely, a philosophical-theological analysis. In popular imagination and professional analysis, theories of addiction can be generalized into a two-party system, the models of disease or choice. In Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice, Dunnington attempts to bring a third podium to the debate stage. A “third way” approach to conceptualizing addiction is charted that challenges the dichotomy of the traditional camps. By exploring addiction through the angle of philosophical-theological analysis, Dunnington offers “habit” as an idea that explains more accurately the experience of addiction and recovery. With a right analysis of addiction through the nuance of habit, the root of the problem can be identified more clearly, and spiritual help can be administered with more impact. Three theses are identified that contribute to his goal. First, in order to get beyond “conceptual confusions” muddying addiction studies, philosophical analysis of human behavior is crucial because these models are incomplete. Second, modern culture has contributed to the severity of today’s addiction problems. Finally, the theological category of sin is necessary to clarify the addiction experience. These arguments contribute to the book's quest to get underneath the idea of addiction. There are other themes in the book, but these are the central claims Dunnington points out. His critique of the strict disease versus choice dichotomy is devastating and demands a different conception of addiction.
I think Dunnington’s most powerful insight is connecting addiction to identity. The focus on habit is valuable, but it is in service of identity formation. The idea of addiction as a means to identity progressively trickles out of his descriptions throughout the book. For example, he argues that “rather than being things that we have (as diseases are), addictions are more like things that we become. In his critique of modernity, the story of one’s life is stripped of any external significance leading to addiction as an alternative path to purpose. Addiction pulls a person’s identity out of the bonfire of subjectivity and places it on a rock of certainty. The Christian doctrine of sin makes sense of this connection between addiction and identity or, in other words, becoming what we worship. This is because addiction as understood under the category of sin is “not fundamentally something that we do but rather something that we discover about who we are.” As one addict declares, “I hadn't just become addicted--addiction had become me.”
The root problem of addiction is perverted identity. This is crucial for moving forward pastorally with those trapped in its clutches. Addiction is a mode “of fashioning a self and structuring an identity” that attempts to deceive one into thinking they live independent of God. Healing from addiction starts with an acceptance of who God is and who we are through the encounter of worship:
Right worship, on the other hand, trains us to see that the disorder and disunity of the self are themselves a symptom of our sinful insistence on maintaining control over our own lives. Such disorder and disunity therefore cannot be rectified by anything that we might do but only by renouncing our claim to be able to establish an impermeable and unified identity. Worship trains us to see that the self is not something that we establish but rather something that we continually receive from God.
Ultimately, this Copernican revolution through worship releases the addict from the enslaving task of pursuing an identity through addiction and invites them into the totalizing story of God as their defining truth and motivating purpose. This is an inroad into counseling addicts that pastors can confidently implement.
Another benefit of this identity insight is the nuanced critique it offers against A.A.’s “once an addict, always an addict” philosophy. Though humble, this attempt at identity is too anthropocentric. Our predicates of identity must be conditioned by our relation to God. Trials of addiction cannot become definitions of who we are if God has written an overriding description upon us. This conception also limits the outcomes of recovery. In contrast, a Christian account of recovery is “reckless in its hopefulness.” Christianity does not consign sin/addiction as an essential mark of who we are; but rather it is contingent. Dunnington writes, “Therefore Christians live into the hope that their destiny is a harmony between who they are and what they want and do, between their being and their act.” This optimism yet avoidance of naivete gives pastoral wisdom and theological courage for discipling addicts in hope of recovery.
Overall, this book was the most intellectually compelling in its arguments and the most moving book I read with its narrative anecdotes. This is the kind of writing I aspire to read and emulate.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope one or more of these selections interest you. Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! May you have a prosperous year of reading in 2023.