Thursday, August 9, 2007

Roots Reading

A friend recently asked me for the reading list I used for one of my classes at Regent College. Since this blog has been a little short on theology, I'll post that list here.

This was a guided study class taught by Loren Wilkinson. The year I was there Professor Wilkinson happend to be skipping a year in his usual rotation of teaching "Understanding Creation," but he graciously consented to teaching it as a small group guided study option for a few of us. The format ended up more like a seminar class rather than a first-year graduate lecture course, which was great. We first read through For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care by Stephen Bouma-Prediger. Then each of us chose a research area and presented our work to the class. I focused on developing a theology of food. Here's my reading list for that paper (I cited several other works, but these were the main books I read through completely for the course):

Brueggemann, Walter. The Land: Place As Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2d ed.

Capon, Robert Farrar. The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection.

Jung, L. Shannon. Food for Life:The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating.

Schut, Michael (ed.). Food & Faith: Justice, Joy, and Daily Bread.


A few other great titles I would throw into the mix for anyone wanting resources on environmental stewardship from a theological viewpoint:

Basney, Lionel. An Earth-Careful Way of Life: Christian Stewardship and the Environmental Crisis.

McKibben, Bill. Pretty much anything he's written, but especially The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation.

Berry, Wendell. Again, pretty much anything he's written (including his fiction and poetry), but especially:

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture This is by far his densest, meatiest book. If you need something a little less scholarly (but certainly no less significant), check out the titles below.

Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community

What Are People For?

Home Economics

3 comments:

Stratoz said...

Interesting list of books. I own the brueggemman and Capon. I have read something else by Mckibben and love W Berry. Have you read Living from the center by Jay McDaniel or Ecology and the Jewish Spirit by Ellen Bernstein?

Erin said...

I haven't read either of these, but I just looked them up on Amazon, and they both look very interesting. I'll add them to my list of future reading. Thanks for stopping by, Wayne, and thanks for the book recommendations!

Anonymous said...

Friends,
I was just surfing the web and happaned to see this discussion.

Seeing that you mentioned my older book, I thought I'd let you know about a newer one that has come out: The Splendor of Creation, A Biblical Ecology. Its a close reading of Genesis 1 from an eco-spiritual perspective. You can find out more about my work at www.ellenbernstein.org (including reviews of the books)

Other of my favorite books in this area (although scholarly) are
The yahwist's landscape by Ted Hiebert and
The Ethos of the Cosmos by Bill Brown ( both christian bible scholars)

Another beautiful book and not scholarly is
The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by Belden lane

Best
Ellen Bernstein