Tom Steffan’s and William Bjoraker’s The Return of Oral Hermeneutics: As Good Today as it was for the Hebrew Bible and First-Century Christianity: We work with oral-preference learners here, and we have so much to learn about how oral people learn and think. We are so used to only reading to learn that we’re constantly having to re-examine our efforts here where the majority of people don’t read–which is a good thing! We’ve seen people grow deep in their knowledge of God and His Word, and their obedience to it, through storying. Still, when we talk about things like seminary education the impulse is always to do more and more reading. We’re hoping this book (ironic to read a book about oral methods!) can continue to challenge our thinking and help us learn tools that will better serve our people.

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul: One thing we’ve learned this past year is that not everyone thinks the same way we have about America, about race in our country, about our history. That includes the local believers and pastors we work with here! We have a lot to learn. We as a couple have been remiss in assuming that we understood our history and the current racial landscape when we’ve only ever really heard about these topics from one perspective. This year we’ve intentionally listened to African-Americans and other minorities on race in America, and we have learned so much–but only scratched the surface. Looking forward to learning what this book has added to the conversation.

John Owen’s On Sin and Temptation: I confess I started this one in April of last year and haven’t finished!! I got pretty bogged down. A sweet friend and I were reading a whole series of books on spiritual formation, but I didn’t make it any farther than April! Oh dear. My plan this year is to keep plugging away at this one all year 🙂

Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah’s Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery: We work in a country that was colonized by our European neighbors–even possibly ancestors. We can see evidence of this all around us–of the ongoing effects on life here for Malagasy people. Our presence here as missionaries does not exist in a vacuum from this fairly recent history of colonization. We have a lot to learn about how this history affects even faith and religious practice here. Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence is in this category as well, and is also on our list.

James Cone’s Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian: Even theologically, the sources we’ve taken in over the years have come from an extremely limited perspective. I don’t think I’ve ever read a theology book by an African-American Christian, or an Asian Christian, or a Native American Christian . . . much less an African Christian (other than Athenasius and Augustine, of course). And yet I think I can contextualize theology to Malagasy Christians much further from me culturally? Whew. I have a lot to learn. Here’s to a start.

Eugene Nida’s Message and Mission: The Communication of the Christian Faith: We read another book by Nida (who has some foundational works on Bible translation) that gave us new frameworks for understanding aspects of what we would call a concrete (not abstract) culture here in Madagascar. Hoping this book can add to those types of frameworks in a helpful way.

Dean Fleming’s Contextualization in the New Testament: Contextualization–how truths are understood and expressed in different cultures and languages–is a big part of our life and work here. The reality is, as Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah point out in their book (Nathan started it this week! 🙂 all of us are living in a contextualized Christianity, as no human currently on earth shares the specific context of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. Understanding how the first Christians contextualized, we hope, will help us recognize contextual decisions our own culture has made, and help us learn from local Malagasy believers as they contextualize Scripture and the Gospel in their own culture.

Michael Gurian’s The Wonder of Boys: I’ve got no brothers and now a son! 🙂 I have a lot to learn about the ways boys communicate and learn. What a challenging moment for children we’re in, where discussions around gender and sexuality have become so complex. I believe that God’s Word provides answers to gender and sexuality questions–but honestly I’m not even sure what questions people are asking, and so certainly can’t answer them effectively. Looking to read a lot more on this topic. We welcome suggestions! Hopefully this will be a good start.

Richard Delgado’s and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: The topic of Critical Race Theory has gotten a lot of attention recently in evangelical circles. At this point, we as a couple don’t even know enough about it to explain it to someone or form any kind of statement on it, so we’d like to learn about it from the primary sources first–thanks to Dr. Christina Edmondson for her encouragement to do this on the Be the Bridge Podcast!