Upcoming Conversation Partners: Books I’m Reading and Blogging On

Here's a quick list of books I'm reading and the sorts of conversations I hope to have on this blog (and on Facebook / Twitter) about them. Enjoy!

• Teen 2.0 by Robert Epstien – as you know, I've been reading this challenging book and I hope to continue commenting on it in the coming weeks. It's a long read and a lot to take in but it's really changing the way I think about the young people I work with every day.
  
• On the Nook Color:
  
  • Back on Murder by J. Mark Bertrand (of the Bible Design and Binding Blog) – not really sure I'll be blogging about this but it's a darn good read!
    
  • Mockingjay (Hunger Games book 3) by Suzanne Collins
    
• The Jesus Paradigm by David Alan Black – a very surprising book from a Southern Baptist seminary professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It is challenging many of my assumptions about faith and practice – especially around church practice and national identity. I told my wife the other day, "This is a book that Frank Viola would write if he had a doctorate in theology."
  
• Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work by Eugene Peterson – We're reading this as a church staff at Centenary UMC and I must say that it is already been a difficult read for me. I LOVE Peterson's work but it's a difficult book to read on the back end of a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education since Peterson spends much of the introduction critiquing the sorts of "pastoral care" I've been learning about. Recently I posted on Facebook that I believed that students in seminaries should be required to take one unit of CPE before taking advanced theology courses. One commenter accused me of "putting the theological cart before the horse" and compared Clinical Pastoral Education to training in "just another service industry." I replied by questioning how familiar he was with the process of clinical pastoral education and responded, "I doubt, equally, whether you have really studied theology." I began to wonder if I had missed something.
  
• Theology for the Community of God by Stanley Grenz – In light of the above referenced conversation, I decided to return to one the first theology books I ever read to attempt to re-discover "how theology is done." I will be reading this book over the next few weeks and months in an attempt (at first) to reach some understanding of the best "starting point" for theology. I'm looking forward to conversing with folks around this topic.