Here’s some books I’m looking forward to reading (and, in some cases, re-reading) in 2010:

• Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (The Terry Lectures Series) by Marilynne Robinson
• John Knox: An Introduction to His Life and Works by Richard G. Kyle & Dale W. Johnson
• John Knox by Rosalind K. Marshall
• Lectures in Christian Dogmatics by John D. Zizioulas
• Christ and Culture by Graham Ward
• Mary Slessor-Everybody’s Mother: The Era and Impact of a Victorian Missionary by Jeanette Hardage
• Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance by Myk Habets
• Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election and Christology in Calvin and Barth by David Gibson
• Encircled Lands: Te Urewera, 1820–1921 by Judith Binney
• The Knot of Vipers by François Charles Mauriac
• Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality by Thomas Reynolds
• Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology by Edwin Chr Van Driel
• Barth by Eberhard Busch
• Radical Forgiveness by Antoinette Bosco
• Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki by Judith Binney
• John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man by Carl R. Trueman
• John Calvin by Simonetta Carr
• The Theology of Rowan Williams A Critical Introduction by Benjamin Myers
• Accompany Them with Singing – The Christian Funeral by Thomas Long
• A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
• Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James
• Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ by Thomas F. Torrance
• The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor
• The Calvin Handbook by Herman J. Selderhuis
• Changing the Conversation: A Third Way for Congregations by Anthony B. Robinson
• Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity by Amos Yong
• Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later edited by A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone
• Evoking Lament: A Theological Discussion edited by Eva Harasta and Brian Brock
• Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society by Stanley Hauerwas
• Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence by Stanley Hauerwas
• Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier
• The Just War Revisited by Oliver O’Donovan
• Kierkegaard and Theology by Murray Rae
• Figures of Dissent: Reviewing Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others by Terry Eagleton
• Christianity without God by Lloyd Geering
• The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
• Christianity, Modernity and Culture edited by John Stenhouse and GA Wood
• Building God’s Own Country: Historical Essays On Religion In New Zealand edited by John Stenhouse and Jane Thomson
• On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene: Unpublished Lectures and Sermons by Ernst Käsemann
• The God Who Believes: Faith, Doubt, and the Vicarious Humanity of Christ by Christian Kettler
• Thomas F. Torrance by Paul D. Molnar
• The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
• The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian Scotland and Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church by James Lachlan Macleod
• Banner in the West: A Spiritual History of Lewis and Harris by John Macleod
• An Educated Clergy: Scottish Theological Education and Training in the Kirk and Secession, 1560–1850 by Jack C. Whytock
• Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission by Nathan R. Kerr
• Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology by Michael J. Gorman
• Martyrdom and Identity: The Self on Trial by Michael Jensen
• Theology as Hope: On the Ground and Implications of Jürgen Moltmann’s Doctrine of Hope by Ryan A. Neal

All of which reminds me of Alberto Manguel’s invitation to engage in reading (‘a ritual of rebirth’), an invitation which also carries the warning that spending too much time on the internet is to play with something like hell:

‘In our time, bereft of epic dreams – which we’ve replaced with dreams of pillage – the illusion of immortality is created by technology. The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all, is our equivalent of the mare incognitum, the unknown sea that lured ancient travelers with the temptation of discovery. Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web’s outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal. Like the sea, the Web is volatile: 70 percent of its communications last less than four months. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present – which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell. Alexandria and its scholars, by contrast, never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth’. – Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2006), 27–8.