Haley writes about this as if peering over a steaming latte, still processing, eyes wide as she grapples with this “positively operatic” story:

Chapter 22 is one of those vivid passages replete with so much complexity and concurrent heavenly and earthly action that I lean back and think— ‘ok…is it just me, or is this some seriously wild shit??’

The candid blend of scholarly analysis and dramatic energy is an accurate but incomplete thumbnail of Haley. She is consistently exuberant and down-to-earth, in ways that can obscure her intellectual depth. During our two years in an MFA writing program (now hosted at Whitworth), her analysis was equally sharp whether scrutinizing rom-coms or transcendental poetry. This MFA is her third postgraduate program. The second was at Oxford, studying theology. She’s got range. To wit:

Ok. We’ve got God sitting up in heaven like some kind of mob-boss, hoping one of His (and this ambiguity interests me immensely) non-human servants—an angel?? or some kind of fallen-angel/demon better suited to dark dispensations?? – ‘entices’ Ahab to his death in battle. I’m just going to point out that this seems, you know, not very nice, even if we do understand it as a righteous judgment, which I think is certainly what the text wants of us.

Haley is an exceptionally perceptive reader. And, like so many poets, she writes with searing honesty. She wouldn’t lift her pen to repeat the obvious, nor is she here as an antagonist to challenge God’s goodness. She’s simply reading well, tackling legitimate questions raised by the text, and unafraid to let it show. (Shocking, I know.)

If Haley had floated her inquisitive reflections at the coffee shop just off campus, I would have responded as soon as she paused with her ever-expressive face demanding an answer. (This intense expectation is represented in her essay by the double question marks.) As a man old enough to be her father, and one who taught a study of 1 Kings just a few years back, I would likely have smugged out a utility phrase like, “If God looks bad, we know our reading is off.” This is a sincere and a useful perspective I employ with myself. But in this context, it comes off as dismissive, rebuffing the invitation to engage. As a friend, I owe her more.

By sharing her provocations publicly, she’s opened the door to a written response, raising the stakes for the conversation and pushing me to think more carefully.

Different Questions

The first thing I noticed is that she’s asks different questions than I did, resulting in a different reading. Questions work like headlamps, guiding our attention to reveal some things while leaving others in the dark.

See for yourself. Notice what stands out to you in the opening lines of this story:

For three years there was no war between Aram and Israel. But in the third year Jehoshaphat king of Judah went down to see the king of Israel. The king of Israel had said to his officials, “Don’t you know that Ramoth Gilead belongs to us and yet we are doing nothing to retake it from the king of Aram?” So he asked Jehoshaphat, “Will you go with me to fight against Ramoth Gilead?” Jehoshaphat replied to the king of Israel, “I am as you are, my people as your people, my horses as your horses.” But Jehoshaphat also said to the king of Israel, “First seek the counsel of the Lord.”
– 1 Kings 22:1-5 (NIV)

Compare what stood out to you with what caught Haley’s eye:

Jehoshaphat’s first response—before he does anything else—is to affirm his close relationship with Ahab: “I am as you are, my people as your people, my horses as your horses.” – only after broship confirmation—a purely relational move—does Jehoshaphat venture to say “Inquire first for the word of the Lord.”

Whatever you noticed, it probably wasn’t an exact match for Haley’s observations. I love this about scripture. It’s a big part of why I enjoy studying it in groups willing to discuss. We each see different things, which usually leads to intriguing conversations, and adds up to more than any one of us could have seen alone. This happens often enough for me to be persuaded these stories were crafted as conversation starters, among other things. It is one reason Tim Mackie of the Bible Project refers to the Hebrew scriptures as ancient Jewish meditation literature. The writing is provocative, intended to get us thinking whether alone or in conversation.

The questions we bring to a text are often shaped by our personal habits of mind. Through Haley’s experience in theatre as an actor, director, and teacher, she has honed her ability to rehydrate dialogue into characters. Each terse exchange she reads opens a window into a carefully constructed cosmos of motivations, relationships, and themes. The Biblical authors often wrote with great artistry, layered meanings, established patterns, call backs, and whatever else aided them in loading as much meaning as possible into each line. These techniques gave us very short stories that have kept people productively plumbing their depths for millennia. Literary techniques reward skilled readers, like Haley, who take the time to unpack them.

By contrast, my perspective is shaped more by my beloved commentaries. Written by scholars, these reference books offer concise overviews of historical context, translation issues, debates on interpretation, and how the passage relates to other scripture. Commentators synthesize centuries of scholarship to offer me the educational equivalent of fresh cut fruit on a platter: bite-sized and ready to eat. Commentaries allow me to become remarkably well informed with minimal time investment, which is a glorious gift when preparing a thirty-minute lecture every week. I truly love them, appreciate them, and am not giving them up.

Yet, I can also readily admit that the best learning is often slow-cooked. Scripture can be microwaved, but the flavors are better when simmered in a crockpot. Since the commentaries make it easy for me to quickly collect more than enough notes for a thirty-minute lecture, they can temper the urgency to dig for insights. There’s a temptation, at least for me, to lean too much on these books, treating them as the teacher’s edition for a passage, giving me all the answers with very little of the work.

When preparing a lecture, I often collect the most interesting facts, then look for a major theme or puzzling concept in the text to serve as my focus. Surveying related scripture helps me sketch a more systematic understanding of this big idea, which becomes my centerpiece. This is exactly how I approached my lecture on this passage a few years back.

While Haley begins by asking what motivates individual lines of dialogue, I open with contemplation of “providence” as a theological concept to explore. Haley looks closely at the first 39 verses of 1 Kings as they are given. I treat them as a mystery best solved by bouncing around to excerpts from more than a dozen books of the Bible. I’m extracting related passages from different authors, often writing centuries apart, to consider how phrases from different stories might bear on the big idea I’ve selected. I’m not saying this is wrong. I hope it’s not. I delight in the miraculous unity of scripture as a whole and plan to continue such explorations. But Haley’s read helps me see another way to productively engage the text and to realize my own approach seeks a coherence that is intentionally missing from 1 Kings 22.

Now I’m craving the Haley Hodges Dramatic Analysis Commentary Series. But even without all her answers and insights rendered in bite-sized chunks, her vector of questioning has already provided new tools for reading and reflecting.

Into the Fire

Shortly after reading Haley’s essay, I was preparing a lecture on Daniel 3—the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. It opens with King Nebuchadnezzar erecting a golden obelisk to represent his empire. He summons a huge crowd to gather around the field where it towers. An announcer conveys the King’s command: when the music starts, you will adopt the posture of worship. This is a problem for the devout Jewish men at the center of the narrative. Captured in Israel and taken to Babylon, their exceptional talents have earned them positions of power and high visibility. But they refuse to bow to this symbol of conquering empire, which leads to their being bound with ropes and shoved into the furnace.

It’s been fifty years since I first heard this story on a Sunday morning. I have revisited it countless times since, as have most of the men in our group. The big idea was obvious: providence (again!) Commentaries helped on many key issues—what court astrologers did, the importance of publicly expressing fealty in melting pot cultures, that obelisks were built in antiquity with mortar requiring a large furnace at the build site, and so on. All helpful.

But Haley’s more theatrical read pushed me to stay in this story longer and look closer. I sought to empathize with individual characters. If I were cast as one of them in a play, how would I say their lines? If I were directing a film, how might I convey the felt experience of these few men, in a crowd of thousands, not bowing to the empire’s music?

Just asking the question suggested the image of NFL players Colin Kaepernick, Eric Reid, and Eli Harold taking a knee during the national anthem. Remembering that moment helped me better feel the discomfort of conscientious objectors, silently but emphatically refusing to profess allegiance in a sea of easy conformance. This was the new insight I needed to see further into the passage, into the drama of the story, and thus better appreciate all it offered.

I am indebted to Haley for providing a new perspective, for reminding me of the way curiosity leads us into closer reading, and for demonstrating how multiple perspectives give us a more complete understanding.

Personally, I could stop here and be satisfied. But demonstrating how she reads was not Haley’s point. Her essay puts far more emphasis on the questions raised by the passage itself.

And that will require an essay of its own:
Questioning Scripture to Meditate (Part 2)

By attempting this on Substack I have (oddly) chosen to keep the discussion out of the context of a traditional conversation, exchanging comments in real time. Which is likely why I find it challenging: I’m trying to retain the tentativeness of two people working through questions together, while using a format normally deployed to share conclusions.

In a personal conversation I can take much shorter turns, count on interruption when I’m headed off the tracks, ask questions to clarify, quickly and easily recant mistakes or rephrase where I just didn’t express something well. It’s private, forgiving, and ephemeral.

Public writing is different. It permits (and thus demands) more careful thinking, taking a longer turn, and I’m finding it seems to require moving toward some sense of resolution. A phone call would have been much quicker. And yet, the higher demands of writing are yielding benefits, pushing me to think further and providing an opportunity to shape an essay that holds less confidence than I am accustomed to reading.

I’m not done thinking but, as of today, this may be the best I can offer. A summary of my thinking thus far and a few conclusions I feel certain will change. All the usual caveats are in play: I have no formal training in theology, am still a learner who finds his own understanding revised regularly in ways large and small, and so on. But here are some thoughts which I hope will provide useful grist for Haley and anyone else wrestling with these questions.

Q1 - On a Good King Doing Stupid Things

Jehoshaphat, the ‘good guy’ king, does not say ‘inquire of the Lord’ immediately when Ahab propositions him for wartime allyship. Instead, the first thing he does is say something like ‘what’s mine is yours’ – a gesture at least as relational as it is political. The text does not easily offer an interpretation involving insincerity or manipulation. He subsequently goes to war with Ahab even after receiving the prophecy of failure from the prophet he himself pushed for, sensing the prolific falsehoods at hand. These are troubling, interesting, dense nuances

I must confess, my 2024 study of this chapter minimized the role of Jehoshaphat, seeing him primarily as a foil to Ahab’s refusal to seek guidance from the LORD. But now that Haley has pointed it out, I can see his missteps are glaring.

(By the way, Haley is undoubtedly familiar with the distinction between “Lord” and “LORD.” But I did not pick up on it right away. Once reminded that Lord means “any master” and LORD in all caps represents the name of the living God himself, the passage made more sense to me, so I’ve retained that style here.)

The first oddity she notes is Jehoshaphat making his offer of military support—“what’s mine is yours” —before encouraging Ahab to inquire of the LORD. That does suggest he’s privileging relationship over ethics.

I’m also struck by Jehoshaphat glibly riding his chariot into battle, agreeing to retain his regal dress while Ahab dons a disguise. Jeho does this knowing they are riding into a battle in which God has arranged to entice the king, the one wearing royal robes, to be killed. The scene goes all the way to slapstick when he turns to run, crying out as the enemy bears down on him.

Haley notes that Jehoshaphat is celebrated as a good king. An appraisal that will be repeated just a little lower on the page in verses 43-45. So which is it, good king or fool? Seems like both.

Nudged by Haley into a closer reading, I’ve noticed a tension approaching paradox in his desire to ally with Ahab. God is consistently in favor of reconciliation, restoration of relationships, and unity for his people. From this perspective, unifying the southern and northern tribes would be a glorious legacy for Jehoshaphat.

However, scripture is also consistent in warning against partnering with the wicked, whether that’s taking advice from a snake, filling a harem with foreign wives, or worshipping Baal alongside the one true God. Ahab is not a suitable ally since he is explicitly, the worst ever (1 Kings 16:30.)

Throughout scripture we see the story of a people who are loved and protected by God yet seem congenitally bound to reject his guidance. Israel fails repeatedly by trusting their own ideas over God’s, relying on military power rather than God’s protection, and making alliances with evil kings. (I’m speaking of Israel in the Bible here. Not commenting on current events.)

Perhaps this story highlights the potential for conflict between these two impulses: restoration and peace are good but pursuing them by partnering with the wicked leads to death.

Or, more generally, we can take Jehoshaphat as a warning that even those who sincerely trust in God are capable of being idiotic. A plan can be partially aligned with God’s values and still be foolish.

There is, no doubt, more to take from this story, but that’s how it’s landing for me right now.

Q3 - On Determinism and Freewill

Allow me to defer the second question for last, and take up this one next:

3 - How does God’s omniscience intersect with the many places he—in ‘real’ (human) time—changes His mind, as He does regarding Ahab’s fate in chapter 21? What does it mean that human action can prompt God to change? What are the implications, if any, of 1 Kings Ch 22 for determinism vs freedom RE human & divine will?

While I love many film genres, I find time travel plots difficult to enjoy. I have a cognitive allergy to the impossible logic and characters intent on changing futures that have already happened.

Discussions of omniscience trigger this same kind of reaction, frustrating my attempts to think it through. Does God know the future or cause it? If he causes it, I don’t see how we’re free or responsible for our actions. If he doesn’t cause it, how can he already know what will happen? And if he doesn’t know what will happen, how can we be confident things will work out as he promises?

Maybe he’s outside of time and can see it all at once. But if he can see the future, doesn’t that mean it’s already fixed in some sense? Perhaps it is because I live in time that this is beyond my comprehension. In my experience, decisions must be made and the future is uncertain. I don’t see a way to resolve this, and frankly I’ve grown weary of thinking about it.

Determinism and freewill seem to me straight up paradox: two claims that appear to contradict yet are both true. A friend helped me name this a few years back. I was wrestling with a puzzle along the lines of “who decided Ahab should go into battle?” He explained that both God’s sovereignty and our responsibility are present throughout the Bible. I was frustrated by looking for an either/or dichotomy, when the passage was clearly claiming both/and. Paying attention to this pattern for years now, I’ve seen it throughout the Bible. It might not be on every page, but it’s close to that.

There is much evidence of God knowing the future in detail, as if he is outside of time or equally close to all moments. And there are many stories of him interacting with people in real time, responding to what people do—like blessing Ahab when he repented.

For any meaningful relationship, it feels like we need some back-and-forth interaction. If God isn’t listening and responding, guiding and convicting, forgiving and teaching, then I’m not at all sure what’s on offer here. What are we called to if not the restoration of this kind of relationship?

Lately, I’m seeing the teachings of determinism and freewill as answers which meet distinct but complementary needs. When I’m asking whether my actions matter and if my life is meaningful, I’m drawn to passages providing assurance of freewill. When I’m asking if God’s promises will be kept, I look to the passages on determinism and omniscience. Together these answers give me the satisfaction of doing things that matter in my life, without the responsibility of keeping the entire world from going to hell. I need both perspectives to function with hope.

I’m not sure that will work for anyone else, but it’s giving me some peace these days as I continue making one decision after another, choosing to hope in the face of whatever will be in the headlines today.

Q2 - On God Giving Up

Of the three, this one seems the most tender, most vulnerable. It seems to hold the most fear, for self or others. It’s the one I’d least like to answer with a shrug.

2 - God seems to have given up on Ahab (Ahab was, after all, given many warnings and chances) – I’m not sure how else to register God’s seeming desire that he be enticed into a foolish and unnecessary death. Does God give up on people? Or is it just that His omniscience means He knows Ahab will never really come around, so what reads as ‘giving up’ is actually an acceptance of Ahab’s free (evil) choices, paired with perfect, divine understanding these will ultimately be ‘against’ Him?

The plainest reading is that yes, God has given up on Ahab, for the very reasons Haley articulates. I wonder how many were praying for the end of his violent tyranny, how many asking God why he allowed Ahab to live another day.

When Ahab repented, God responded immediately, and mercifully as described in chapter 21. But that was three years prior to the Jehoshaphat scene, and now he is back to his old ways of abusing power, killing to take whatever he wants, hating the LORD’s rule, and despising the last known prophet. If anyone needs to die, it’s Ahab.

And yet, even when I ask God to stop evil in the world, arranging a hit feels out of character. Death seems so wrong that I struggle to pencil in a line from ‘deception and murder’ to ‘goodness and love’. We wrestle with this, despite the Bible’s stories of divine judgement, and the promise of one more to come.

Attempts to connect good with death often assume that when someone is sufficiently wicked and powerful, death is not only the greatest good for the greatest number, it’s also the most merciful available option. I’m not saying I am qualified to judge, and Christ seems clear that I shouldn’t attempt it. But as a thought experiment, consider Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Hussein, Amin, or whichever cruel war-wager most offends you. Perhaps at some point, a man can be so far gone that even our exceedingly patient father agrees that death would be better for him than going on like this.

The idea of a mercy killing reminds me of cinema cowboys putting down a horse with a broken leg. When the rider knows the remainder of the horse’s life is all pain and suffering, no matter how much he loves this horse, the bullet is a kindness. If God knows there is no chance of repentance and restoration, I can see how it might be mercy to put him down.

The idea of letting go is stated more plainly in Romans 1:28-32

Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Here we have a strong assertion of freewill and responsibility. We know enough to do what is right. We don’t know it all, and we will make mistakes, but we have sufficient knowledge for moral culpability. Granted, in this passage God does not end life, but simply “gives them over” to the chosen state of mind. But it seems to give a direct answer to the question of whether God gives up.

As Haley mentions, if God knows the hearts of humans, then he knows when hope is gone. Examples include the flood survived only by Noah and his family and the meteoric fall of Sodom. He delayed the destruction of the Amalekites until their evil reached its fullness, but no longer. Something similar is happening today as he patiently waits for as many as possible to be saved before he brings this age to a close.

This fits well with the Bible’s near constant description of God’s outreach to us as an invitation which we are free to accept or reject. He seeks the love of his children, but love cannot be forced.

It seems that everywhere God has ended one or more lives, directly or through a mediator, it is clear that all hope has been lost. When all we do is kill, harm, and cause suffering; when no hope remains for redemption into real life, the contest is over. We’ve chosen death. There’s no point in prolonging the experiment. It sounds harsh, yet who would see mercy in leaving rotten fruit on the kitchen counter or a wounded horse in a ditch?

And yet.

Scripture doesn’t refer to humans as rotten fruit nor encourage abandoning the wounded. The prophet Isaiah speaks of God’s future servant, the savior, saying, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”

Maybe God gives up on us in the same way a doctor gives up on a cadaver. At some point, there’s nothing left to do but record the time of death and prepare the grave.

Yet, I am immediately questioning my own analogy. In part because God defines life differently than medicine does. The kind of life Doctors work to save is rendered “bio” in Greek, defined by a pulse and respiration. God seems far more concerned with spiritual life, “zöe” in Greek. He is more interested in a heart that can still love and respond to love, than one that simply pumps blood. Perhaps Ahab was so committed to the rejection of all that is good, there was no hope left. At that point, the reed is not bent but broken. The wick is not smoldering, but cold. It’s over. Prepare a grave.

Perhaps this is why God was soliciting a volunteer from the heavenly host, “Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?” Maybe.

But even this feels off. Each characterization I choose seems to hide more than it shows, as if each attempt to bring resolution lops off important nuance and complexity.

Failing to find resolution often leads me into discussions. As I’ve talked to friends about this, they have reminded me of God’s patience which extends so far beyond my own. The “God of second chances” seems like a stingy name for what we see in scripture: a divine father, husband, brother, and lover who might better be called the “God of as many chances as it takes.”

In Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God, he reminds us that a “prodigal” is one who “spends in a recklessly extravagant way.” Yes, this fits the son who demanded his inheritance and rode off to spend it all on empty indulgence. But it also characterizes the father in this story, standing on edge of his estate, waiting for his lost son to return home. Presumably waiting for as long as it takes. Still hoping.

The pattern of patiently awaiting restoration is threaded throughout the Bible, starting on page two. Adam and Eve did not die on the spot. There was a real loss in being removed from the garden. They could no longer experience God’s direct presence. But they were given long lives in which to seek reunion.

In the second recorded wrong, a jealous Cain lifted a rock and smashed the skull of his brother. While a punishment of death might be just, God merely sent Cain away and promised him protection from vengeance, presumably leaving the door open for restoration.

For years, when asked how a good God could kill someone, I’ve cited a verse from Genesis 6 which tells us God chose to flood the earth when “the LORD saw that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” It’s time to put the horse down.

I was fairly settled into this argument when I read an extraordinary essay in Comment Magazine by Rhody Walker-Lenow.

Her exploration of the flood narrative, and reflection on what we typically leave out of our retelling, is affecting, instructive, and models deep thinking on scripture. Toward the end, she quotes that strange little passage [1 Peter 3:18-20.] which gives us the line in the Apostles Creed about Jesus descending into hell after the crucifixion. Peter tells us Christ was there to “make proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah.”

Walker-Lenow notes this is the proper end of the flood story, when all the people who died in the flood are found. They were not obliterated but held in something analogous to a prison, life suspended in a place without freedom, awaiting their time before the judge. Peter tells us this was the first task of the Messiah, who “suffered for sins, once for all, the righteous and the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.”

It seems God ended the heartbeats, the bios of these people when they had gone to only evil all the time. But even then, he preserved their hearts. Perhaps he ended their freedom primarily to protect them from doing further harm to themselves or others until the day of rescue and restoration.

I don’t know. But I don’t see a threat of giving up on us as essential to making a compelling invitation into life at its fullest. A threat seems a terrible way to build one’s capacity to return affection, to deepen trust, or to establish a relationship.

To anyone asking, “Has God given up on me?” the most appropriate response might be, “Do you want him to?”

The preponderance of evidence in scripture suggests to me that when the idea of ‘God letting go’ brings angst, we can trust he is still waiting, scanning the horizon, watching for my return.

Is this helpful in moving the conversation forward? It seems unlikely I’ve said anything Haley doesn’t already know. Come to think of it, making that the goal would put the bar well out of my reach.

Whether or not my thinking has been helpful for Haley, it should be clear how much her thinking has helped me. Haley’s questions pushed me to revisit and reconsider a story I thought I knew, learning much in the process. Her reading modeled techniques I’m finding helpful in exploring other passages. Her willingness to share questions led me to inspect my own understanding of God’s patience with the rebels, his perspective on the wandering, and the durability of his character, which grounds so much of my hope.

Dr. David McGlynn (on instagram) patiently mentored me for one year of the MFA program, consistently encouraging me to write about times of personal suffering. I continue to grow in my understanding of what he meant, expanding the definition of “suffering” to include “struggling with” or even “working through.”

Haley’s essay invites the reader into her mind and heart as she wrestles with God. And, looking back over my response, I can see I am trying to do the same. It is not possible for any of us to provide definitive, non-debatable answers to the questions Haley raised. But it does seem possible for me, or anyone else, to give some thought to these issues and share a little of our own struggle with them. Maybe Haley sees something in there that helps move her thinking forward. But even if she doesn’t, she knows she’s not alone in her meditations. And that may be reason enough to read. And write.

Acknowledgments—I learned a ton while working on this response, much of it from friends willing to entertain my thoughts in conversations or reviewing drafts along the way, including Mary Jane, Taylor, Billy, Ryan, Caiden, Rob, Shelly, John, and the inspired editorial attention of Rebecca. Gratitude seems insufficient recompense for your patience and guidance. I owe you.

In my case, the answer is: go think about it. Over the past six months I’ve been unable to shake the challenge of responding well to these questions. I find it intriguing that her post, ending without resolution, provoked more thinking for me than anything else I read about 1 Kings.

After my first time through Haley’s essay, I attempted a quick scan of 1 Kings 22 to remind myself of the context, and found this to be one thorny passage. My mind snagged on the heavenly brainstorming, the misleading of prophets, and the ordained death conspiracy. These puzzles slowed me down, demanding careful reading. Skimming thwarted, I downshifted to a more studious pace and posture. This was going to take a minute.

Big Questions

The author of this scroll knows he is crafting a narrative to raise questions. Haley lists three of them in her closing. For convenience, allow me to summarize (and flatten) as follows:

• Why would a good king do stupid things?

• Does God give up on people?

• How do determinism and freewill relate?

These are not plot flaws from sloppy writing but enduring questions of human experience, a literary feature inviting the reader to think.

Considering such issues has been the heart of education for centuries. Teaching the Big Questions is not a roundabout way of arguing for agnosticism. They’re most helpfully received as invitations to ponder known mysteries—mysteries to be accepted as gifts. Seriously reflecting on a question such as, “Do I have freewill?” is helpful, even when no answer is universally accepted. Long before the first university, the value of contemplation was already clear from the sacred writing of the Hebrews.

The Bible urges us to consume the word of God (Jeremiah 15:16), to ponder it (Luke 2:19), meditate on it (Joshua 1:8), work to understand it (Proverbs 2:1-6), and to be changed by it (Hebrews 4:12-13). We are told to carefully discern what these writings are saying (2 Peter 3:15-16), discuss and examine them with each other (Acts 17:11), to learn from them (Romans 15:4), and to use them, benefitting one another (2 Timothy 3:16), shaping the community of God’s people (Deuteronomy 6:7), and clearing away the lies and delusions of this world (Romans 12:1-2).

Questions with an answer, like “7 * 8 = x” initially require thinking to understand. Penciling seven rows of eight dots onto a sheet of graph paper helped me visualize and validate this claim. But beyond that, I don’t find much to think about.

Extended thinking requires a good puzzle, something unresolved I can sink my teeth into, like “Why do I do stupid things?” It’s in the chewing that I find the problem breaking down into components, helping me see further into the complexity.

Facts are part of understanding. But facts alone are insufficient for addressing the incoherence, frustration, and limitations we find in human experience. So, we wrestle. In community. It’s helpful to be able compare notes when meditating on issues like why we feel alienated, how society should be organized, or what makes something good.

How to Respond?

Like life itself, Haley’s essay is unresolved. Her questions hang in the air, smoldering. I suspect it is this invitational vibe that has me feeling a burden to respond. Finding a way to respond well turned out to be a much bigger challenge than I expected. Given how often my own questions about scripture have been greeted with concern by Sunday School teachers, pastors, and friends, I’m eager to applaud Haley’s willingness to raise these.

But to simply reply “Good questions!” is rather unsatisfying.

A second option is to respond with definitive answers. This seems even worse. For example, assume I added a comment to her post along the lines of:

Great questions Haley! Real quick:

• We do stupid things because we’re sinners.

• Yes, God gives up on people. Check out the last 10 pages of your Bible.

• In human time it feels like freewill. Outside of time, it is more like a history.

Hit me back up if you need more explanation. : )

This reeks of dismissal. It betrays the respondant’s unwillingness to spend three seconds wondering why Haley wrote this essay about something so obvious. It is tone deaf, unhelpful, and completely ignores her set-up:

To me, these things together speak of the human person as extraordinarily emotionally and morally complex and—alarmingly—subject to utterly unpredictable changes of heart that have immense consequences. Of long-term interest:…

Haley can see the simple answers. Simple answers abound. But many of them conflict with each other. To not recognize that is to miss her point.

A third option is for me to say “Gosh, I don’t know. Now you’ve got me questioning everything!” But this also feels wrong, at least for this discussion. Yes, it acknowledges complexity and affirms the validity of her questions, but it fails to engage. Worse, it’s the kind of response that tells the asker their questions are contagious. By articulating them they’re spreading uncertainty, cracking the foundations of others.

How to Discuss?

So, what then would constitute a meaningful exchange? If scripture is raising big questions for us to consider, it seems like we should talk about them. I’d like to participate, making a productive contribution that moves the conversation forward. Yet I’m struggling to recall an article I can use as a model. Something published which refrains from settling issues the Bible leaves open, yet offers a modicum of satisfaction or at least forward movement.

Many books start with a sincere question which the author feels no one has adequately answered. But this is a set-up which will be answered by the rest of the book. Reading such a question on page one of a book, we presume the author has spent years considering and researching, finding answers and carefully articulating them with depth and nuance. That’s why we bought the book. (And wouldn’t we be disappointed if they had nothing to offer?)

To see a scholarly discussion in action often requires reference to multiple authors with contrasting views. Each author takes a relatively clear stand. Reading just one I might think the issue settled. But reading several, I begin to see the shape of a discussion with each writer advancing an argument and addressing what they see as most problematic in other perspectives.

Some grow weary of all this confidence and walk away from the lot of them to join an alternative camp of writers cautioning us against brash certainty. They are willing to say they don’t know, but the ones I’ve read are rarely willing to say much more than that. They go right off the other side resisting all certainty, praising the indescribable, apophatic, unknowable nature of the divine.

It is easy to appreciate and respect the humility of these authors. Easy to agree that any sentence about God is incomplete. And I count myself among those frustrated by the overly confident. However, the questions that tug at my heart are those which arise while trying to navigate a problematic life. I must make decisions and want to do so based on the best possible understanding of reality. Reading from this circumstance a humble caution about the delusion of confidence is of little help. I’m not asking anyone to be more confident than they really are. But questions about life are seeking practical answers. Perfection and completeness are out of reach. Yet we still make decisions, usually working from the most plausible understandings we’ve found.

Can I stake out some ground between simplistic certainty and hopeless uncertainty? Can I do that honestly, without being disingenuous? This path is narrower than I suspected.

I’m not giving up yet, but this is clearly going to require one more essay:
Questioning Scripture as Community (Part 3)

The subtitle Notes on Wonder steps on the toes of the lovely River of Song metaphor, eagerly interjecting this spoiler to tell us plainly what the book is really about. Doyle invites us to gape alongside him at glittering moments. Whether innocent or horrific, monumental or unsung, momentary or enduring, or all six of these together, he holds them up in wonder, packing an extraordinary amount of joy and pain and honesty and awe into remarkably short pieces, hewn from long rambly sentences, playfully turned phrases, and uncommon words carefully chosen to earn the reader’s attention.

Doyle’s voice is, for me, infectious. He bestows a mood of wise reflection, unhurried but not wasteful, a poet on his day off. His sentences meander, winding along to make claims and then modify them, burbling downstream in a flow that sounds more like thinking than speaking, lulling us into the unhurried comfort of a Sunday stroll, until we are surprised to see it end.

To mark our path, he draws from an ample supply of pristine phrases, as in this fragment:

“…drowsing between my alpine dad and willowy mother, in a pew filled with brothers seated with parental buffers so as to reduce fisticuffery…”

He loves precise and evocative language and savors surprise, but he loves his readers even more and so remains a gentle voice, always easy to follow.

Doyle does heavy lifting in short essays without feeling dense. He is plainly smart but not intellectual. He is both playful and serious. Despite the confident strokes and careful crafting, he retains a sense of groping, of feeling his way forward, just one clumsy stumble ahead of his reader.

His craft abounds in astonishing and often understated ways. But I am most impressed by how his heart is revealed. He pushes further than most into tender spaces. Consider this portion of his essay on humility entitled, “The Final Frontier”:

…but humble never really registered for me because I was not humble, and had no real concept of humble, until my wife married me, which taught me a shocking amount about humility, and then we were graced with children, which taught me a stunning amount about humility, and then friends of mine began to wither and shrivel and die in all sorts of ways including being roasted to death on September 11^th and I began, slowly and dimly, to realize that humble was the only finally truly honest way to be in this life.

So much is happening in here. Presenting humility by regretting his lack thereof opens this section with a playful sense of self-negation. The layered meanings send out poetic ripples, yet any pretension is undercut by a voice that would sound more at home on a porch than at a coffee shop open mic.

The smile which began for me at “was not humble” broadens at “married” and again at “children” only to evaporate in the terrific turn to death. The structure builds like a joke: the first observation is funny, the second amplifies the humor and establishes a pattern, so we can be surprised by the turn in the third. When he delivers the punch line, it is not comedic, but lands in the gut. And yet, this brutal end is where we see tenderness.

He doesn’t leave death in the abstract, nor drop us into a scene of sitting vigil beside a deathbed. Instead, he says “wither and shrivel and die” describing the sight of a close friend dying. Perhaps quickly in a fire or, like Doyle himself, slowly over months. The image suggests many visits, spanning multiple stories, each of which defines tragedy, displayed here with clarity through the eyes of a horrified friend who can offer only his presence and a willingness to bear witness. The surprising turn, visceral detail, and tear-filled, open-eyed gaze usher in a poetic range of connotations around the inevitable, natural end of all living things: to shed vitality and then life.

In arguing for humility, many might set up the folly of hubris. Or help us picture the contemptible sight of the proud and powerful. We would all like to be better than those fools, yes? Yet Doyle will not leave us taking humility as one more way to prove ourselves superior. Instead, he drains all pretense from the room and reminds us that in the end, there is nothing we can do to preserve our strength, stature, or status. We will all die. Between now and then, each day is a gift. He doesn’t exhort us to be humble. He shows us what humbled him and invites us to partake of the antidote.

It was a brain tumor that led to Brian’s death in 2017 at the age of sixty. As the end approached, Doyle blessed the effort of his good friend, David James Duncan, to compile four score of his best loved essays into this book. Duncan hoped they would provide some financial support for the family Doyle left behind, each purchase adding a drop to that stream. Yet the reader is the greater beneficiary, receiving these many pages of wonder, distilled and concentrated in the keen observations of a man who worked so hard to articulate “the only finally truly honest way to be in this life.”

The book: One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder

*An annotation is my attempt to explore some aspect of craft through an extraordinary work. I describe it more fully in: To Write Better, Read Better

Her reflection on this in The Situation and The Story didn’t come to my attention until after enrolling in an MFA program in creative writing (now hosted by Whitworth University). Filling out my application, I was skeptical that anyone could do anything to help me write the way I wanted. But the frustration of unsuccessful attempts to learn in isolation left me desperate enough to take the chance, committing the time (and tuition) required to enter this forge.

My application was accompanied by a portfolio. I wanted to scrawl across the cover letter: Just tell me what my problems are. If my character is too beige, my mind too pedestrian, or my soul too shadowed to generate interesting sentences, just say so. If all you can do is shake your venerated heads and shame me for neglecting Mrs. Brady’s lessons on diagramming sentences, so be it. Whatever. But please, no pussyfooting. Just tell me what I lack. (The faculty were nothing like I imagined they would be.)

Months later, I arrived on campus, braced for the knock-out punch condemning my bundle of inarguably off-target writing samples. This left me temporarily blind to the confident but understated and often casual pointers to reading better. In each lecture I listened through my demand, “Tell me how to write better.” So I had probably heard it a dozen times before I noticed the first half of this admonition: “To write better, read better.”

Reading and writing feel radically different to me. The phrase initially sounded like a quote from the Sufi mystic Rumi, a pithy irony more at home on the wall of Persian café than a truth I would cling to forevermore. I have since seen this observation so often in writing about writing, that it would seem trite if not for the fundamental importance warranting repetition. For many accomplished writers, reading is credited as both the fuel for continuing their solitary march and the ladder we climb toward improvement.

“Read better” seems plain enough. But in struggling to understand what it actually means, I realized our lecturers and visiting writers were using it with a few different meanings.

Some meant “read better writing”—spend time with better crafted prose, poetry, essays, and memoirs. Others meant something like “be a better reader”—which felt like having a running coach tell me to “run faster.” Others were encouraging us to “work harder” at our reading, and mercifully pointing the way. Today, I hear the phrase as a chord, three notes stacked to elicit harmonics none could sound alone.

1 - The exhortation to read better writing serves as the bass note, the foundation of the chord, and is perhaps the most obvious. Thankfully, they provided reading lists pointing me to exceptional work as well as personalized recommendations of specific authors and titles.

There may be people who can write better than anything they’ve ever read, but I’m not one of them. Time spent with well-crafted work expands my understanding of what is possible to accomplish by stringing words together.

I was quite surprised to learn it’s not essential to affirm, or even fully understand, what a writer is saying to learn from their technique. A few of the many works that overpowered me included Shakespeare’s King Lear, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and W. G. Sebald’s walkabout in Rings of Saturn. My understanding of these remains insufficient to properly evaluate their perspectives. Nonetheless, each contributed to my understanding of what writing can do. (My sincere thanks to Cameron, Scott, and Robert for helping me crack these open.)

2 - The highest note of this chord was encouragement to be a better reader. This stoked our aspirations with a magic trick performed repeatedly in the flagship lectures on Art & Faith. Each expository talk served as a variation of the same type of performance. Like a magician inviting an audience member to inspect a hat, rope, or sword, we received a reading assignment in advance. I would read the selected essays, poems, or books and notice all that I could. On the first day of the term, I took my seat in the classroom and watched a seemingly ordinary person take the stage with nothing up their sleeves. They would smile, open the book, and make it levitate. Then spin. Then turn into a phoenix and fly laps around the room.

With each new term I read with more analytic zeal, trying to see everything before they showed me. Yet every time, the miracle happened. In their hands, any given page could surrender a rabbit, become an umbrella that summoned a thunderstorm, or make me disappear. At least for a while.

These lectures revealed the expansive headroom above me; a cavernous space in which to grow. They pointed out levers and opened panels I hadn’t even seen to show us how the piece was arranged, why it worked, and how carefully crafted each element was. In this way, the path to a master’s degree steadily deepened my sense of how far I was from actual mastery.

3 - The middle note of this chord is my personal favorite. It’s the blue collar note emphasizing how we can work harder to become better readers. The labor is performed by investing time to read more attentively, think further, and reflect formally on a given piece. This is how they taught us to fish, to feed ourselves, to unpack what we found compelling in any writing. Here, we were given a tool to find the craft techniques we most needed to develop next. They called it “writing annotations.”

In the MFA glossary, an annotation is the short exploration of some aspect of craft made by analyzing a sample of remarkable writing. After one lecture, Alissa Wilkinson, described them this way: in an annotation, we’re not asking what a work is about, but rather, how the work is about that.

Like so many elegant tools, the annotation leverages a simple principle. This one serves to auto-personalize learning. There are an endless number of questions to explore in any page from a T. S. Eliot, Joan Didion, or Frederich Buechner. But the things that I, David, find intriguing are typically at the waterfront of my learning. If it grabs my interest, it is something I know enough to see, yet it remains new enough to be intriguing. Often, it is something I discovered for the first time while scrutinizing this very piece.

Snagging my attention provided an entry point for the annotation, but most of the learning occurred while writing. I would often start with one claim, then find my understanding incorrect or incomplete or oblivious to something much more interesting. This process revealed how much I was learning by writing out my analysis, teaching me more than gained from mental reflection alone.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, was in the pair of books first assigned. The day it arrived, I ripped open the shipping envelope and stood, turning pages above the packaging crumbs, slowly shaking my head. I could not understand what game he was playing or why. I began my annotation with an argument this was non-sensical, providing a litany of the ways in which he was breaking every rule of writing. Where is his thesis? His support? Why is he not defining terms? Where does he establish his own credibility? Does he expect anyone to understand him? I intended it as condemnation but it better served as confession. This was a list of all the ways Four Quartets was unlike anything I had read before. And it was in the process of making my case that my certainty faltered as I noticed a few bits I could make some sense of. These suggested potential reasons for his less-than-direct approach. A single bulb lit, marking the first step of my long-delayed journey into poetic expression.

A dozen annotations later, examining Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I set out to explain how cooly detached her authorial voice was. But as I gathered evidence, I noticed her narrator was also highly engaged. My annotation became an exploration of how she was doing both simultaneously. Another light came on.

One last example: a year later, reading Frederick Beuchner, I decided to reflect on how he made familiar things strange to help us see them better. But as I selected quotes to demonstrate this, I realized he wasn’t making them strange so much as making them intensely specific. He was obviously drawing on his own personal experience, but choosing moments that every reader is likely to have had. Is this making the familiar strange, or is it reviving a cliché by downshifting into sense perception so we can discover it once again? More lights had come on.

In each annotation the insight I gained was precisely what I was ready for. It lay adjacent to what I knew, offering a single additional step, in one direction or another, to enlarge my map of literary terrain.

Compared to new creative work, annotations are casual. More of a sketch than an attempt at art. More analysis than expression. They could be (almost) as casual as an email to my mentor about a book I read. But I quickly learned that there were real rewards for whatever time I invested in digging, testing my understanding, and rewriting to more accurately describe how the piece was working.

This chord is now as much a part of my practice as tempo, pace, and long runs are when training for a marathon. I hunt for better work to read, interrogate the mechanics, and, when it’s truly remarkable, invest time in writing out my understanding of how the author is accomplishing this miraculous thing called “good writing.” Working together, these strategies accomplish considerably more than one would in isolation.

To say more would be to fly even further into abstraction or metaphor, so instead, I’ll offer an example. Just a couple pages from me, appreciating a couple pages from one of the most distinctive, and delightful voices I encountered in the program: Brian Doyle.

Photo by Jonathan Singer on Unsplash

This remarkable and much-needed book addresses how believers can respond when our faith hits turbulence. Coming from theologians, you might expect a book on what to believe or why to believe. But the authors take on the more surprising question of how to believe. Or to phrase it as a question I have asked more than once, with sincere urgency, “What can I do when my faith stops making sense?”

Like many, I grew up in a cozy faith fort, furnished with Bible stories and memory verses. As life became more challenging, I needed new strategies for navigating disappointments and grappling with God. The church can be maddeningly unhelpful at integrating theology with the rest of life. New questions arose in my mind, which apparently no one could answer, and the whole thing started feeling mighty thin.

Slow Theology (Brazos, 2025) is the book I needed. My twenties could have been quite different if I had encountered a professor like Nijay Gupta or A.J. Swoboda. (pronounced: swa-BOAT-ah)

In the years since returning to faith, I’ve learned how common it is for a crisis like this to precede what I understand as “second-growth faith.” These challenges signal the beginning of a new deeper phase in which we labor more actively with the Spirit to work the gospel into the fabric of our lives.

For example, consider the sixth chapter “Let Pain Be The Altar” (which, btw, seems an excellent name for a metal album.) Here they offer a particularly helpful section on lament, pointing out four ways the Psalms invite us to respond to painful experience: 1 Be honest and transparent with God.
2 Name God’s character.
3 Invite God to act.
4 Affirm God’s faithfulness and commit to hope.

These four exhortations permeate the entire text. The authors are upfront about the struggles we face in reconciling theology, scripture, and life. They affirm God’s character as both knowable in practical ways and yet, beyond what we can know fully. They convey an implicit trust that God will be present and active as we wrestle with our quandaries and will ultimately bless us. It is rare to see a work so accepting of questions which also maintains an unwavering commitment to hope in God’s faithfulness.

The authors say, in one way after another, to embrace the journey, think deeply, and ponder the mysteries we encounter. Disappointment and suffering come to us all. The way forward is to keep thinking, remain in community, and trust that God will continue cultivating us. The title Slow Theology is presumably taken from this long-simmering experience.

Seasoned Christians can readily agree with this approach but may have forgotten the panic of first encountering such challenges. Swoboda and Gupta are both college faculty, well-positioned for conversations with believers at this inflection point. The text appears to be collected from many informal conversations with students. These aren’t lectures, but compassionate responses to sincere questions. Typical of the sensitivity shown throughout the text, they ask:

“What can we do to develop a faith that not only is resilient through difficulty but actually grows as it faces challenges? What if, by God’s grace, every new question we asked was not a problem? What if it was just a way for our faith to become deeper?” (9)

The gentleness and promise in this phrasing epitomize this book’s affect; it feels like it was baked in conversations during office hours, then sliced into topics and served here, still warm from that compassionate oven.

The quote above is clearly building on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thinking about anti-fragile systems, a connection made explicit in the text. This is one among dozens of wide-ranging references the authors use to illustrate aspects of believing, including the tragic invention of chemotherapy, an experience Swoboda had with a UFO (later identified), and five lessons from an obscure 3100-mile footrace. The breadth of references can feel chaotic, but together they effectively convey that knowing about faith is, in many ways, like knowing about anything else.

Scripture remains present throughout, as we should expect from two theologians. Yet they don’t assume readers share their Bible knowledge. At times, they will introduce a well-known passage, such as the parable of the soils, with no presumption that the reader has heard it before. Other times, they’ll go deep into biblical B-sides to pull out a verse like Isaiah 45:7 “I…create evil” (KJV). Such passages can be weaponized out of context, and I appreciate their willingness to address them directly.

The chapter names, including “Take Your Time,” “Embrace the Theological Journey,” and “Think Slowly,” are indicative of the perspectives the authors encourage. These are helpful ways to respond when some life event or line of thinking reveals a shortcoming in your current theology. The text offers encouragement to articulate the question, revise your understanding, and strengthen your faith.

Each chapter addresses its theme through four to seven short essays. For example, chapter four, “Ponder the Mysteries” includes ways of responding to a newfound theological puzzle. The authors note that our questions sometimes work like cliff-hangers, urging us to keep reading. Other times our questions highlight the incomprehensibility of God or an element of the ‘now and not-yet’ nature of the kingdom.

“This tension—that Christ is disclosed and yet not yet fully understood—is at the heart of what we mean by theological mystery.” (96)

The chapter concludes with a brief essay on “Practicing the Mystery of God” which encourages us to hold our current understanding with humility, remain open to the Spirit, and trust Christ.

Our work of faith in Christ should always be written in ink. It is our theology that should be done in pencil. (90)

Throughout the book, Gupta and Swoboda hold space for what we don’t know without sliding into agnosticism or adopting an apophatic stance of, “if you understand it, it’s not God.” Yet they readily admit there are questions we can’t answer. It helps that they remind us that many things we now know required a genuine struggle before finding peace in our current understanding. Successfully walking this line of epistemic humility is one of the most distinctive accomplishments of the text.

…

David Lindrum is still trying to figure everything out. Since 1994, he’s worked in college textbooks so he can keep posing questions to professors. He’s been in Bible Study Fellowship since 2002, so he can ask questions about scripture weekly. In 2025 he received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from SPU, where he is best known for ceaselessly asking, “What is creative nonfiction?” He lives, with his long-suffering and saintly wife Mary Jane, in Asheville, NC.

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Class of 2025

Last month I crossed a small stage at Seattle Pacific University to shake hands with Scott Cairns, receive a hood from Mischa Willet, and officially graduate with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. It is now time to (slightly) broaden the circle of friends I’m leaning on to help me continue to grow as a writer.

Excellent book recommendations were among the most treasured gifts from my time in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University (now hosted by Whitworth University.)

It took a while to understand how to engage with a book primarily for the writing rather than the content. But spending hours with well-wrought words made it easier to shift my focus from what a work is what about to how it is about that.

I primarily read creative nonfiction, a category which is notoriously difficult to define. But I’ve learned those who love creative nonfiction relish work that is remarkably well written, an author relating events through personal experience, and using careful examination of something specific to effectively explore a universal aspect of the human experience. Three traits that are uncommonly common in the list that follows.

Why so much reading in a program on writing? I slowly learned and came to deeply appreciate a cue often repeated in lectures, conversations, and books about writing:

If you want to write more, read more.
If you want to write better, read better.

So read we did. Over two years, we each wrote sixty reaction papers on books, essays, and poems reflecting on the author’s voice, craft, and choices. Each student’s list of books was unique, depending on the mentor, student goals, style, and topics of interest. The sixty I chose are listed below. Each of these taught me something. Together they dramatically broadened my understanding of what writing can do in skilled hands.

Short List

My mentors David McGlynn and Robert Clark put together a list of CNF essentials for this program. From that list, I grappled with these:

• James Agee / Knoxville: Summer of 1915

• Wendell Berry / What Are People For?

• Joan Didion / Slouching Towards Bethlehem

• George Dyer / Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

• Patricia Hampl / Blue Arabesque

• Michel de Montaigne / Essays

• Marilynne Robinson / When I Was a Child I Read Books

• Richard Rodriguez / Hunger of Memory

• Mary Ruefle / Madness, Rack, and Honey

• W. G. Sebald / The Rings of Saturn

• D. J. Waldie / Holyland: A Suburban Memoir

• David Shields / Reality Hunger

Long List

They also provided a longer list of exceptional books. Although at this level, the distinction between first and second tier is like taking gold or silver at the Olympics.

• John Berger / Here is Where We Meet

• Frederick Buechner / Whistling in the Dark

• Patricia Hampl / Virgin Time

• Anne Lamott / Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

• Kathleen Norris / Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

• Walker Percy / Lost in the Cosmos

• David Foster Wallace / Consider the Lobster

• Christian Wiman / My Bright Abyss

• Lauren Winner / Still

Art & Faith

Art & Faith lectures formed the conceptual center of this program. Each lecturer chose substantive and challenging texts to explore. Mercifully, the 90-minute, daily lectures during our residencies cracked open these literary geodes, enabling me to glimpse the gifts these works have for those with the skill to see.

• Julian of Norwich / The Showings

• T. S. Eliot / The Four Quartets

• Emily Dickinson / 1461 from “Before The Door of God”

• Christina Rossetti / Time Flies: A Reading Diary

• William Shakespeare / King Lear

• Emily Dickinson / The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge / The Major Works

• Camille Dungy, ed. / Black Nature

• Rachel Carson / The Sea Trilogy

Spiritual Experience

Many of my choices were guided by my abiding interest in how others experience the spiritual. Several of the books above do this well, but I selected the following titles primarily to see how others have described theses internal experiences of perceiving and relating to the Spirit.

• St. Augustine / Confessions

• Christian Wiman / Zero at the Bone

• Stephen Pressfield / The War of Art

• Simone Weil / Waiting for God

• Brian Doyle / A Book of Uncommon Prayer

• Sallie Tisdale / Mere Belief

• Donald Miller / Blue Like Jazz

• Burrows & Sweeney / Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light

Craft

In addition to the craft books above, here are four more selected primarily to hear these authors reflect on the process and craft of writing.

• Anne Lamott / Bird By Bird

• Phillip Lopate / To Show and To Tell

• Vivian Gornick / The Situation and the Story

• George Saunders / A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

Humor

Evidently, very few people write well and with humor, but these are three of the best.

• Harrison Scott Key / How to Stay Married

• David McGlynn / One Day You’ll Thank Me

• David Sedaris / Calypso

Fiction

One definition of Creative Nonfiction is “using the tools of fiction to write about true events.” To that end, Robert Clark consistently encouraged me to read more fiction, including these remarkable books: a novel, a short story, and a collection of stories.

• William Maxwell / So Long, See You Tomorrow

• Andres Dubus / A Father’s Story

• Denis Johnson / Jesus’ Son

One of a Kind

The remaining titles were each selected for a different reason. But this unclassified list includes some of the heaviest hitters.

• B. H. Fairchild / What He Said (a poem)

• Esau McCauley / Reading While Black

• Brian Doyle / One Long River of Song

• Frederick Buechner / The Alphabet of Grace

• Paul Kalanithi / When Breath Becomes Air

• Richard Rodriguez / Late Victorians from “The Art of the Personal Essay”

• Ross Gay / The Book of Delights

• Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message

• Tim Bascom / Chameleon Days

• C. S. Lewis / The Four Loves

• Henry David Thoreau / Cape Cod

It’s impossible to quantify the benefits of reading and reflecting on these works, but there is no question their impact was substantial. On my first day in Seattle, the task of reading sixty books in twenty-four months loomed as a foreboding wall to be scaled. On the last day, it was clear they’d been a huge gift. Our readings were not the wall, but the ladder we used to ascend. How could I not pass them on?