January Reading Report Blog

This will be the first of these monthly reading reports. You may not like it. I’m not entirely sure this is going to work in the blog format. 

I hope that this is a helpful way to be accountable to others for reading and learning in a regular fashion. I am going to try and refrain from mentioning too much of what is read for “work”. Of course, in ministry all reading is work. 

Book 1: 

Wolf, Christoph Johann Sebastian Bach the Learned Musician.

I have been reading this long book since mid summer. I decided to pretty much wipe it out over the New Years holiday. Bach is my boy and I always like to learn more about this quintessential Protestant musician. One of the strengths (as you might gather from the title) is that Wolf locates him in the broader intellectual stream of German Lutheran Humanism. The book is filled with charts and tables outlining the prodigious output of Bach as a composer. Sections also unpack his prowess at educating his wife and children to both aid him in his labors and for the boys to be composers themselves. The book also reminds the reader that, due to the kinds of professional positions he held that Bach’s work included not only composing and performing but also the teaching of Latin and Theology as well as expected tutoring in all areas of the musical curriculum. 

If you are not appreciative of classical music this book is still worthwhile because it gives a glimpse into the professional life of someone who, though a layman did everything He did to the glory of God. 

Book 2:

Nichols, Tom The Death of Expertise.

1. Premise

This is a book of what I call “popular” or “public” epistemology. It is an attempt to investigate how or why people believe what the believe and what processes they use to accumulate knowledge.

 This was a reread for me and I thought it important in 2021 because I want to focus on Theological depth in my preaching this year. How people think, what their approach to knowledge, information, the online information infrastructure, academic thinking, and expertise are all relevant to the public proclamation of the Gospel. 

The author is a public-policy expert so he is aware that he is goring his own Ox.

2.  Representative Quotations.

“This is more than a natural skepticism toward experts. I fear we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers—in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all”

“The death of expertise, however, is a different problem than the historical fact of low levels of information among laypeople. The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge.”

Excerpt From

The Death of ExpertiseTom Nichols

https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-death-of-expertise/id1199477086 This material may be protected by copyright.

“The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb”

Excerpt From The Death of Expertise Tom Nicholshttps://books.apple.com/us/book/the-death-of-expertise/id1199477086 This material may be protected by copyright.

“And so it is. When resentful laypeople demand that all marks of achievement, including expertise, be leveled and equalized in the name of “democracy” and “fairness,” there is no hope for either democracy or fairness. ”

Excerpt From: Tom Nichols. “The Death of Expertise.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-death-of-expertise/id1199477086

Why read it: This book helps  sort out some of the intellectual madness we see in all current media platforms. Not only does it help to remind us that to be objective is impossible, it also reminds us that the perspective and ideology we choose is just that: a choice. 

To be honest there was a lot of other reading in January. Lot’s of research on the Gospel of Matthew. Re-reading some Clancy and other stuff for relaxation. For this first month of 2021 I did nail a couple of helpful, insightful books that I would heartily recommend.