Summer Reading List 2023

As summer rolls in, our team has curated a list of recommended books, essays, and prose for your enjoyment. Whether your toes are in the sand or you’re in the backseat on the road trip, we hope these theological and thought-provoking reads will find you wherever you are this summer.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

The World Does Not Revolve Around You

The Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest, author, and writer for the New York Times, grapples with the nature of patience, and the related questions of humility and control. Why is patience so hard to practice?

Tish Harrison Warren

Rebuilding Beloved Community

Lisa Sharon Harper discusses the work of rebuilding beloved community through discovering ancestry and rejecting the title of whiteness.

Lisa Sharon Harper

Healing Racial Injustice Through Memory

Highlights from Dr. Keri Day's 2020 interview with Miroslav Volf on racial inequity, systemic transformation, and Christian community.

Keri Day

Made for Relationships

We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical. Evan Rosa traces two stories of parental deprivation: Harry Harlow's Monkey Love Experiments and the horror of 1990's discovery of Romanian asylums for orphans, documented in the 1990 report "The Shame of a Nation,” on 20/20. Then psychologist Mari Clements (Glenville State College, formerly Fuller School of Psychology) discusses the importance of healthy marriage dynamics for young children’s development and how it provides a secure emotional base; the relational imago Dei; the close emotional bonds that must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need; we talk about important phases of human development, into adulthood; and the theological backdrop to these questions of the human drive and need for emotional connection.

Mari Clements

Tolerating Doubt & Ambiguity

Is your faith a house of cards? If you were wrong about one belief would the whole structure just collapse? If even one injury came to you, one instance of broken trust, would the whole castle fall? If one element was seemingly inconsistent or incompatible—would you burn down the house? This depiction of the psychology of faith is quite fragile. It falls over to even the lightest breath. But what would a flexible faith be? Resilient to even the heaviest gusts of life’s hurricanes. It would adapt and grow as a living, responsive faith. Psychologist Elizabeth Hall joins Evan Rosa to discuss the domains of psychology and theology and what it means for each to “stay in their lane”; she introduces a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and identifies the social- and self-imposed pressure to know everything with certainty; we reflect on the recent trends toward deconversion from faith in light of these pressures; and she offers psychologically grounded guidance for approaching doubt and ambiguity in a secure relational context, seeking to make the unspoken or implicit doubts explicit. Rather than remaining perched upon our individualized, certainty-driven house-of-card faith; she lays out a way to inhabit a flexible, resilient, and relationally grounded faith, tolerant of ambiguity and adaptive and secure amidst all our winds of doubt. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Elizabeth Hall

Angry at God

Have you ever been angry at God? Psychologist Julie Exline (Case Western Reserve University) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to discuss the psychology of spiritual struggles and anger at God. She reflects on the meaning of spiritual struggle, as well as the possible outcomes and factors that contribute to a personal sense of healing and growth. She speaks to the anxiety and fear that seem to hover around an expression of anger toward God, dealing with objections and concerns that it’s immoral or presumes God to be guilty of wrongdoing. And she offers practical considerations in light of the psychological research around what happens when people choose to express their anger at God or not—how different responses of disapproval or acceptance can lead to positive growth or a sense of successfully dealing with the anger.

Julie Exline

From Surviving to Thriving

At the bedrock of our being as persons is relationality: our ability to be known, to be loved, and to know and love in return. But what kind of claim is that? Theology or psychology? In this episode, Evan Rosa brings Pamela Ebstyne King (Fuller School of Psychology; Thrive Center for Human Development) on the show to discuss developmental psych as the observational study of human change and plasticity in the midst of a whole complex life; relational attachment for the sake of intimacy and exploration and ultimate purpose or meaning; the proper place of self-love; God’s enabling and loving presence as the ultimate secure attachment figure; the importance of learning, gaining skills, and the pursuit of expertise; the prospects of regaining emotional regulation through relationships; the game changing impact of deliberate psychological and spiritual practices to move us well beyond surviving to a life of thriving.

Pamela Ebstyne King

Pursuit of a Life Worth Living

“What we’re trying to do is offer students an opportunity to think critically about the most important question of their lives across important and enduring lines of difference. That can only be good for them as individuals and as global citizens.”

Matthew Croasmun

Gathering Joy

Willie Jennings

The Future of Theology

George Marsden

Life Worth Living and the University

Jonathan Holloway