January’s Books

Starsight – Brandon Sanderson

This is the second book in the Skyward series. Spensa is flung into a whole new world in this book in the series. While I missed the characters from the first book, it was good to find out more about the universe beyond the confines of the protective layer around Detritus. Spensa makes all new friends, and some more enemies, of course. Partway through reading this, I wondered to myself why I was finding it so hard to stop reading and go to bed, and then I realised that almost every chapter ends with a cliffhanger. Great for my enjoyment, but not so great for my sleep. I’ve got the next two books ready to pickup on the reserve shelf at my library. (5 stars)

Lines of note:

“When you’re young, you can assume that everyone older than you has life figured out. Once you get command yourself, you realize we’re all just the same kids wearing older bodies.”

“Infinity went both directions. You could expand forever outward, but at the same time, the closer you looked at something, the more detail you saw.”

Tikkun Olam—To Mend the World: A Confluence of Theology and the Arts

This is a collection of essays, connecting the arts, theology and the renewing of the world. I read a part of this while I was studying and I’m glad now to have the time to go back a read the rest of the essays (4 stars)

Lines of note:

“What a Christian account of beauty is concerned with is a story of human reality bathed in the light of God, of beauty, experienced now as both interruptive promise and anticipation of what is coming. But it is also a story, as this assortment of essays seeks to remind us, in which the capacity to seek the justice of which the kingdom speaks and the commitment to beauty to which the kingdom directs us are not unrelated.”

“good actions are worth doing precisely and only because it is good to do them, and that the world is in some sense made better thereby, even when no grand strategy is advanced or outcome accomplished in the process” – a note to all the pragmatists out there

“Christians have always wrestled with the question of how our commitment to beauty and art relates to other commitments we have as followers of Jesus, not least our commitment to the poor, and to the justice-making work of God’s kingdom” – art can often be resource-intensive and it’s important to weigh that with other claims on our resources.

“mending the world depends on our coming to see and understand the nature of the world’s brokenness.” – it’s not always obvious when things are broken, and we can be blinded by our cultural immersion

Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now – Walter Bruggemann

The main message of this book is that Sabbath-keeping is an act of resistance against our cultural anxiety-ridden push for constant and increasing productivity. This push is not a new one, as the author shows how Sabbath functions in the original Israelite context as an act of resistance and a demonstration of a freeing trust in God, that allows people to live more human lives in community together. There was lots to like in this book, but I also found it a bit repetitious towards the final chapters.

The main message of this book is that Sabbath-keeping is an act of resistance against our cultural anxiety-ridden push for constant and increasing productivity. This push is not a new one, as the author shows how Sabbath functions in the original Israelite context as an act of resistance and a demonstration of a freeing trust in God, that allows people to live more human lives in community together. There was lots to like in this book, but I also found it a bit repetitious towards the final chapters.

Lines of note:

“At the taproot of this divine commitment to relationship (covenant) rather than commodity (bricks) is the capacity and willingness of this God to rest. The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment that God and God’s people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production and so dispatched, as we used to say, as “hands” in the service of a command economy.”

“Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest. “

“Sabbath-keeping as an art form. When taken seriously in faith by Jews—and derivatively by Christians—Sabbath-keeping is a way of making a statement of peculiar identity amid a larger public identity, of maintaining and enacting a counter-identity that refuses “mainstream” identity”

“They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competitor. And as the work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety, so energy is redeployed to the neighborhood.”

“But Sabbath breaks that gradation caused by coercion. On the Sabbath: –You do not have to do more. –You do not have to sell more. –You do not have to control more. –You do not have to know more. –You do not have to have your kids in ballet or soccer. –You do not have to be younger or more beautiful. –You do not have to score more. Because this one day breaks the pattern of coercion, all are like you, equal—equal”

“Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. “

“Sabbath is an arena in which to recognize that we live by gift and not by possession, that we are satisfied by relationships of attentive fidelity and not by amassing commodities. “