Reading Reflections

We’re narrative creatures, and sometimes the best way to make a point is by telling a story. Bryan Loritts calls his book Right Color Wrong Culture a ‘Leadership Fable.’ It’s a fictional account of a Christian school wanting to move out of a ‘transitioning’ neighborhood to a better part of town. They would do a…

The Canons of Dort were written in 1619 in response to the Remonstrance of 1610. Hey, wake up! Did I lose you? Sometimes we have a “present bias” where we give more weight to things in our particular period or time and discount things from another era. But Kevin DeYoung wants us to cherish this…

“I’m sorry.” “It doesn’t make any difference.” These were the two lines that Jeff Green learned to use at age 7 when his mom left. He felt invisible. He didn’t want his dad to leave too. When his mom, Melody, left, she left a note. There are some hot dogs in the refrigerator, she wrote.…

Red Sox fans hate Yankee fans. And Yankee fans hate Red Sox fans. How would that change? Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and hosts an excellent podcast entitled WorkLife. His new book, Think Again, caught my attention when movie producer JJ Abrams came on to Adam Grant’s…

Just Mercy is heavy. Really heavy. It’s a compelling read—a real page turner—but it’s filled with injustice and brokenness. And that fills my soul with grief. Bryan Stephenson tells the story of how he founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama in 1989. It’s a story of fighting injustice. As a Harvard Law student…

Jasmine is married to Phil and they have two boys: Wynn and Langston. They’re members at Redeemer. Wynn, now 4, is named after Wynn Kenyon, who was an Elder at Redeemer in the early days and Phil’s professor at Belhaven. Langston, just 18 months, gets his name from Langston Hughes, an American poet and novelist.…

This book is for preachers. Some of you just stopped reading—but may I suggest that we’re all preachers? Martin Luther said we are to preach the gospel to ourselves every day. In this little 1977 book, Frederick Buechner says the preacher’s task is to tell the truth (1) about the world around him, (2) about…

Jim Collins’ book Good to Great is a study of what distinguishes successful companies from the rest. For this study, a great company had to beat the market and comparison companies for a duration of 15 years. They didn’t start with a hypothesis, but they took the 11 qualifying companies and determined what those companies…

I was first exposed to Jesmyn Ward while sitting under the teaching of Dr. Patrick Alexander and Dr. Otis Pickett (one of our elders). Lecturing in one of the only air conditioned buildings of Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchmen) as part of the Prison to College Pipeline, Dr. Alexander masterfully unpacked Ward’s memoir Men We Reaped.…