I can be a bit of a dilettante in my reading because I have too many interests, so oftentimes I’m making rather slow progress on a quite a few books at the same time. Here’s what’s on my shelf right now.

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Ivan Havener, Q: The Sayings of Jesus (Liturgical Press/Glazier, 1987).

Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time; The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (Harper Collins, 1994).

John Bell, 10 Things They Never Told Me about Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to a Larger Christ (GIA, 2009).

I’ve become increasingly interested in the issue of what Jesus’s radical message really was (to the extent that we can ever get at least a bit closer to it), and in what ways the tradition of the Church both conveys and betrays his message. Hence my interest in these three books. Borg is somewhat of a classic, I think. Bell, better known for all is wonderful Scottish  and other folk music, is delightful, conversational in style, in this collection of rather homiletic reflections, all of them with a good punch. Q is the scholarly reconstruction of a collection of sayings of Jesus thought to predate the Gospel of Mark, dating to the 40s or 50s, or perhaps partially to the 30s of the first century. Since everything in Q is in Luke and Matthew but not in Mark – i.e., it’s all New Testament material – I’m using Q for my daily lectio divina.

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Harvey D. Egan, An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, 2nd ed. (Liturgical Press/Pueblo, 1996).

This is also a great collection for lectio – sometimes when I want a break from Q, I’ll pick a selection from here if it’s tied to the saint’s day or feast day in the liturgical calendar.

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Partha Dasgupta, Economics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007).

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, Macroeconomics, 2nd ed. (Worth Publishers, 2009).

I read religiously Paul Krugman’s column on economics in the New York Times every Monday and Friday, and also his blog at the same paper. His and Wells’s big book is an undergrad text; it helps me fill in the many holes in my knowledge of economics, which only began with the market collapse in 2008. I very much enjoy the Oxford VSO series, and the one on economics is very well written. It’s all about credit – from the Latin, credere – to trust another.

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John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Harver/Belknap, 2009).

You already know I’m reading this since I’ve reported on it here on the blog. O’Malley is a formidable scholar and a sure guide to Vatican II. Highly recommended.

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Marie-Dominique Chenu, Aquinas and His Role in Theology (Liturgical Press/Glazier, 2002).

I’m not a serious Thomas scholar but I enjoy dabbling, so this little book is just the thing for me. I’m especially interested in neo-Thomism and neo-Scholasticism, how they distorted the sources they thought they were following, and how the “new theology” from the 1920s and 1930s had to get out from under that. Chenu is important, and Paul Philibert’s translation is excellent.

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Gianluigi Nuzzi, Vatikan AG: Ein Geheimarchiv enthült die Wahrheit über die Finanz- und Politskandale der Kirche (“Vatican, Inc.: A Secret Archive Reveals the Truth about the Finance Scandals and Political Scandals of the Church”) (Ecowin Verlag, 2010).

Hans Küng, Disputed Truth: Memoirs II (Continuum, 2008).

David Gibson, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperOne, 2007).

I like Church politics, as you know. The first book is the German translation of the book which had appeared in Italian a year earlier and caused quite a sensation. An official in the Vatican Bank kept records of everything, but didn’t want to be there when it went public. So he stored it all in a safe in the basement of an elderly lady’s farmhouse in Switzerland, and left instruction to his nephew in his will for how to find it. The nephew tells the story of unbelievable crime, stealing, money laundering, and on and on, in the Roman curia and the national of Italy. The foreword to the German edition is even more amazing: between the time of the Italian and German editions this has largely ceased to be a story, because Benedict (inheriting yet another mess from John Paul II) has cleaned up the mess, forced one official into retirement shortly ahead of his expected time, and signed the Vatican onto European standards for banking accountability and auditing.
Küng is interesting and I’m learning some gossip about German academia I hadn’t known, but I’m not sure I can recommend this book without some reservations. Küng has a way of telling the story so that he comes out looking suspiciously good compared to his colleagues (or enemies). For example, he contrasts Joseph Ratzinger’s complete lack of pastoral experience with his own shining example of same by telling how Ratzinger ‘merely’ served in a ‘conventional parish’ for a year, whereas he, ever on the front lines of where it’s happening, served almost two years (I’m not making this up) in campus ministry. You don’t suppose conventional parishes have any really real issues of deaths or struggling marriages or failed careers or childbirths, do you? Or again, Küng seeks to discredit Karl Rahner at every turn, and it starts to sound like jealousy. Rahner had the nerve to disagree with Küng on mandatory celibacy, so Küng tastelessly hints at failures in Rahner’s observance of celibacy. Rahner’s supernatural-existential is portrayed as a bad idea which has already faded – I think all the scholars writing books and articles on this topic right up to this day would be surprised to hear this.
At the same time, Küng’s account of the student revolts in Tubingen in 1968 is highly interesting, especially for Küng’s version of how Ratzinger reacted to the revolt. Küng is quite traditional in his view of professorial authority, and he opposed giving students a voice in every decision-making body at every level of the university. He was attacked for not supporting the leftist academic cause of the day, and he said publicly that he had once opposed fascism on the right, and now he was opposing it on the left. In Küng’s telling, Ratzinger was personally immobilized by the revolt, couldn’t handle it emotionally, and lost the ability to see what was going on. Ratzinger never saw that Küng shared his concerns and was an ally; he saw the whole world as his enemy and couldn’t distinguish Küng’s other liberal views from his views on the student uprisings. Ratzinger retreated to Regensburg University, in a diocese with an archconservative bishop – Küng tartly reports that the American press compared the career move to transferring from Harvard to the University of Idaho. In Küng’s optic, Ratzinger comes off looking pretty immature and scared.
David Gibson is one of the very best reporters out there on the Catholic Church today. He has a broad view, a good mind for theology, and a wise appraisal of situations. So this book is highly interesting, even though – alas – it appeared before the sex abuse scandals exploded in Europe. I can’t wait until Gibson writes his book on that – I hope he’s doing so, anyway.

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Editors of the Huffington Post, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging (Simon & Schuster, 2008).

I read the website daily, so this is an interesting back story. I don’t think Pray Tell will ever have their readership, even though they give away all their secrets here.