Deconstruction/Reconstruction Reading List

As I was talking with my good friends right now, it seems nearly everyone is struggling with questions of faith for one reason or another. I was sharing how helpful it had been for me to start seeing a spiritual director and the subsequent reading list that I read my way through. (Because a good reading list is the cure all for everything, right?) They were interested in what I had read, so I thought perhaps my broader audience might be as well. These are in the order I finished them. I found them all valuable and gave me much to ponder. Did I agree with everything everyone wrote? No, of course not. There would be no point in reading books that didn't cause me to do a bit of wrestling, and the wrestling was the point. 

So, the list, so far.

-Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others - Barbara Brown Taylor

-The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs - Peter Enns

-The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It - Peter Enns

-An Altar in the World - Barbara Brown Taylor

I found this to be a truly beautiful book.

-The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life - James Martin, SJ

This was the book I was least excited to read, but ended up really enjoying. I find the idea of Lectio Divina to be both useful and fascinating, which then leads me to feel annoyed that I had never heard of it before this.

-Inner Compass: An Invitation to Ignatian Spirituality - Margaret Silf

-Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants - Robin Wall Kemmerer 

This was not on the list from my spiritual director, but I read it in the midst of the other books and it fits here and complements them. 

-Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions (later republished as Faith Unraveled) - Rachel Held Evans

I went on to start several other books by Rachel Held Evans, but ended up not finishing them. While she has many good things to say, the 'Southern Christian (or questioning Christian) Female Memoirist' has never been a favorite genre of mine. That, combined with the fact that the books and authors she references had already appeared on my reading list, allowed me to give myself permission to set them aside.

I am still working my way through:

-The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently - Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler 

This last is... dense, as in rather scholarly, but Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish New Testament scholar and it is very interesting to read what she has to say. What I find most interesting is learning how various Hebrew Bible passages are interpreted so vastly differently from Evangelical Christian interpretations. 

There you go, that should keep anyone on the same path busy for a while. Plus, many of these authors have other books if you need more.