Lists don't come easy to me...

While I’m utterly unable to match the style or wit of CG, I will attempt this rather childish game. This all started with Ben Myers, who has actually visited my blog! Ben seems to be a rising theological star – I just wish he didn’t post silly things like this and this – do these posts actually mean anything in normal Christian, or even theological, terms? Barth has got a lot to answer for…

I'm always unable to restrict these things to one item...

1) One book that changed your life:
Every book you read changes your life. Donald Macleod’s Behold Your God made me the theological nerd I am today. Everything he writes is worth reading.


2) One book that you've read more than once: Have I read any book more than once… the latest book to enter this category is The Last Things by Paul Helm. The first book to enter the club was Grow in Grace by Sinclair Ferguson

3) One book you'd want on a deserted island: my own compilation of songs, hymns and poems that have touched my heart. It would include Burns, Blake, Donne, Dylan, Faber, Frost, Harrison, Heaney, King, Lennon, McCartney and Springsteen. I’m embarrassed that there are so few females on that list.

4) One book that made you laugh: The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse. I burst out laughing at a bus stop in Glasgow on reading the first page.

5) One book that made you cry: Don’t think I cried, but I vaguely remember being moved inwardly reading An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. The last story in Dubliners, James Joyce, is easily the saddest thing I remember reading - why do people continue to write after Joyce has produced that quality of stuff? Books don't make me cry - death, films, and girls make me cry…

6) One book that you wish had been written: I’d love someone to write a book on the nature of church membership in Scotland from 1400 to the present day. This would actually be a critique of ideas of what it has meant to be a Christian and a church member. It would also have to be the definitive social and theological history of the church in Scotland, including the difficult 20thC.

7) One book that you wish had never been written: I’m too liberal to deny any book the right to exist. I wish people would stop publishing biographies of Hitler, Stalin, et al.

8) One book that you are currently reading: Systematic Theology, Vol 2, Robert W Jenson (yes, I have read vol 1 already!!) I really really want to be conversant with writers like Jenson. But, I just find it so difficult to plug in, engage, and really feel as if it is all worthwhile. Does theology need to be blatantly nonsensical and tautological before it gets published?

9) One book you've been meaning to read: The latest books by Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Greavsie: The Autobiography

Tag: Danni, Dodds - I've no idea if they will respond