Austin Carty lives and pastors in Anderson, South Carolina. He holds degrees in literature and divinity from High Point University, Wake Forest University, and a Doctorate of Ministry from Emory University. He is a lover of theology and the arts, and is particularly passionate about good literature.
He joins me to discuss his book, The Pastor's Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for MInistry.
Austin Carty lives and pastors in Anderson, South Carolina. He holds degrees in literature and divinity from High Point University, Wake Forest University, and a Doctorate of Ministry from Emory University. He is a lover of theology and the arts, and is particularly passionate about good literature.
He joins me to discuss his book, The Pastor's Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for MInistry.
You're listening to episode 205 of the Pastor Writer podcast conversations on faith, life and reading. I'm your host, chase Rupp, local. I've really been looking forward to having Austin Carty on the Pastor Writer podcast. He published the book the Pastor's Bookshelf and we joked before the interview that this is the Pastor Writer show and really he wrote the book on the Pastor Reader. So it's a natural conversation to have and one that really won't disappoint you. Not only is Austin a great pastor and a great reader, but he's thought deeply about how reading informs not just the work of ministry and the pastor, but really all believers. How reading, particularly reading both fiction and non-fiction, can form you as a person and develop character in your life. I was really looking forward to this conversation and it didn't disappoint. I hope that it's as much of an encouragement and a blessing to you as it was for me. As always, thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm joined on the podcast today by Austin Carty. He lives in Pastors in Anderson, south Carolina. He holds degrees in literature and divinity from High Point University, wake Forest University and a doctorate of ministry from Emory University. He's a lover of theology, the arts, and is particularly passionate about good literature. He joins me today to talk about his book the Pastor's Bookshelf. Why Reading Matters for Ministry and I have to say this book is. This conversation is long overdue. I've had the book on my desk and really enjoyed it, and I've just not had the opportunity to have Austin on, so I've really been looking forward to this one. I think it'll be as good as the book is as well. Austin, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Chase, I've equally been looking forward to it. I love your podcast, love what you're doing, and grateful to get the chance to talk with you.
Speaker 1:Well, certainly I'm looking forward to talking about reading, looking forward to talking about books, but give us a little context for your life as a pastor, where you're serving and what pastoral ministry looks like right now for you.
Speaker 2:As you and I record this, we are in late July. In fact, tomorrow will mark the four-year anniversary of my being pastor of Boulevard Baptist Church in Anderson, south Carolina. I was at a church in Eastern Kentucky prior to that and it's just a relatively small, traditional church in the sense of traditional expressions of worship. We have Himmels pews pipe organ, a very different worship expression than that which I grew up in, but over time and talk about this some in the pastor's bookshelf the kind of worship that I really felt drawn to. I've been honored to serve as pastor here for four years and intend to be here for quite some time beyond this.
Speaker 1:Well, I mentioned in the introduction, I got a chance to read the book and when I saw it coming out it was obviously one I knew I wanted to. We are always talking books and reading and certainly anybody who listens to the podcast knows how much reading means for me personally, but also as a minister. One of the scenes or the pieces that I liked most in the book was you open with a story about a kind of personal crisis of reading while on the job. I think it's a good introduction to kind of what the book is and where you're coming from. Maybe you could recount a little bit of that personal crisis of realizing your spending time reading while at work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can absolutely do that because I can still feel it like it was yesterday, even though it was a decade ago. At this point it was my first tenure as a senior pastor and I was not terribly long into that tenure, and I'm someone who obviously is a person who wrote a book called the Pastor's Bookshelf, it goes without saying. But I'm someone who loves to read, I'm an avid reader. But at that juncture in my ministry I had not really connected my passion for reading with my sense of identity as a minister. And so there was an afternoon where I was reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel the Idiot, and I was in my office and I hadn't intended that day to read for as long as I was reading, but I was about two hours into the novel and it just had me gripped. I didn't want to put it down, but the lurking kind of anxiety that bubbled up in me was the fear that somebody might walk in and see me reading in my office. Because, as much as I love to read, I thought, well, they haven't called me here as their minister and, to be kind of more technical and crass about it, they're not paying me to be in my office reading this book right now. That's not what I do as a minister, and so I continued to read, but with this feeling of guilt and shame while I did and the reason I kept reading that day was, along with just enjoying what I was reading there was this not yet articulated but nonetheless very real recognition that what I was doing was somehow inextricably tied to my vocation as a minister. And over time I began to think more about that and talk with more seasoned ministers about their own reading practices, hear from many of them that they really weren't building in much time for reading, which came as a real shock for me and I just began to read a lot about what the reading act does to us as people in general, and then began to think about it in terms of spiritual formation in particular.
Speaker 2:And ultimately, what I came to realize was that that time reading though certainly we can't, as ministers, spend our entire day in our office reading every day we can carve out little chunks of an hour, 90 minutes a day to read, because it has one to one correlative effect and value for all the other things we do as ministers, because all of that reading we're doing is forming us at what James K A Smith calls a subterranean level, to where we might not ever be able to put our finger on the instrumental value that, because I did this here, it's coming out here Nonetheless.
Speaker 2:It's in there, it's shaping the person that we are becoming as ministerial practitioners, and thus it goes with us to the hospital bedside, it goes with us into the pulpit. It's with us when we lead committee meetings. It's with us as we're leading staff meetings. It's with us as we're casting a vision for the life of the church. So it is very important. But, carving out that time, I've come to find this significant, but I never would have found all of that, I never would have come to that if I hadn't had that kind of existential crisis that day reading Del Steyesky's the Idiot.
Speaker 1:Have you always been a reader and enjoyed reading.
Speaker 2:The answer to that is yes and no. As a child, I devoured reading. I loved it. It was my very favorite thing to do, and I talk about this in the opening parts of the pastor's bookshelf too. But when I got into middle school, I quickly realized that reading a lot and making good grades was not the thing that gained a lot of social currency. That being the class clown and other things was prone to make you a lot more popular than being the person who read all the Nancy Drew and all the Hardy Boyz books. So I kind of deviated away from that and I look at the following 10 years as kind of the dark ages of my life, the dark period. But I found my way back to it when I was about 21 years old. I'm 42 now, so really the last couple of decades has been about trying to make up for lost time and also just being a wash in the way that I'm designed, which is a person who just really does love to read.
Speaker 1:As you think about your own reading. You've been having these conversations with pastors about reading. I mean, do you have some perspective on I guess I'd ask the question in two ways kind of the general state of reading I mean, you've got a congregation full of people there in front of you what is reading looking like today? And then maybe more specifically too, the state of reading within pastoral ministry, as you mentioned in conversations with other pastors. Do you find pastors to be readers? How do you find them going about the reading?
Speaker 2:Let me take the second part of that question first and then I'll back into the first part.
Speaker 2:Let's talk specifically about what I've observed and learned from pastors about reading habits. I think that our guild Chase we as ministers are a guild that by and large, almost all of us drawn to this profess and mean it when we say that we love to read. Very few pastors I know of don't at least profess to love to read. But then if you begin to drill down and you know this better than anybody interviewing pastors, of course the ones that you're interviewing are typically the ones that really are doing a lot of it. But when you begin to talk to pastors and ask them what they've been reading, you come to realize pretty quickly that they're a lot of them not doing a whole lot of it. That was one of the things that I really learned early. Once I'd assumed kind of a senior pastoral leadership spot and wanted to talk to seasoned ministers about how they were folding their reading into their daily sense of vocation, I came to find that for a great many of them ones that I admired and still admire, still in respect to a whole lot they really weren't reading a lot. I also knew that it wasn't disingenuous for all of these folks when they said they love to read. But when they did, they just weren't doing it and I really struggled to figure out why. I mean beyond the fact that, yeah, we're just busy and it can be hard to squeeze in reading, which obviously I understand, that's true for any of us. But then I was talking to a fairly high profile minister one time and was talking to him about how he loved to read, but that he didn't have a lot of time for reading and that he didn't read much. I said but you still love to read, right? And he said oh, absolutely I do. I don't really have the time for that kind of luxury. And when he used the word luxury it was like a light bulb went off for me and I realized that that's really the impediment for many of us as pastors when it comes to folding more reading into our daily schedules. And I think this is true of people at large, but I think it's certainly true for us as pastors. We tend to think of reading as a luxury on par with like going to get a daily massage or something or playing 18 holes a day, and I think that we need to reframe reading and that we need to place reading in a different category than some of those things that are, by definition, luxuries that we certainly can't take every single day.
Speaker 2:Part of my book, one of the core arguments in the book is that we need, as people in ministry, to learn to reframe our idea of what reading is, from considering it a luxury to thinking of it as a vocational responsibility. So I think that pastors in general are not reading nearly as much as they would like to, and I think it's because it's such a demanding job and they think that reading is a luxury and therefore can't be justified in the midst of a busy schedule. That's the very thing that was happening to me when I was anxious about reading Dostoevsky's the Idiot that day that we just talked about. It was that I felt like, oh, I'm loving this book, but this is a luxury and this is not what I'm supposed to be doing here. I didn't yet realize that I could see it as a vocational responsibility that would shed light on and that would enrich me and all other spheres of my ministry. A daily massage can't do that. Reading for an hour a day can. So part of my book is taking Eugene Peterson's advice and extending it kind of in the context of my own argument, which Peterson famously says in the contemplative pastor that he would sometimes mark in his calendar an hour or two with FD Fyodor Dostoevsky, and talks about how. Putting it in the calendar, though, is the key thing. So I advise pastors to try to carve out an hour a day and just have that sacrosanct as a time for reading, because it's not just that, it's a luxury, something that you'll enjoy, but it's something that really will bear fruit across the full span of one's ministry.
Speaker 2:And in terms of what pastors are reading, there's a Barnas study that I cite in my book that I found very fascinating, but also not very surprising, which is that pastors, generally speaking, buy more books in a given year than the general public, but pastors buy fewer novels and works of fiction in a given year than the general public, and I think that's something that needs to be addressed within our guild as well, because there are a million reasons for why we all want to be, and should be, reading nonfiction. I mean, you and I have both released nonfiction books within the last couple of years. Obviously, we have a vested interest in hoping people will continue to read nonfiction particularly the pastors will. But I think the reason that we don't read as much fiction is we feel like we have all this stuff to learn and all this information that we want to be able to grasp and appropriate and be able to share, and we think the fiction is just stories, that it's just kind of escapism, something for pure enjoyment, and that's a really reduced understanding of what fiction is, because fiction actually works on us at a deeper register than nonfiction does, a different register, but one even deeper. It's a different way of knowing, and CS Lewis I'm going to digress here, but I think this is useful for the point I want to make CS Lewis, in one of his essays in God in the Dock, talks about how there are two ways of knowing, and this is Lewis's philosophy on knowing.
Speaker 2:He says that there's knowing in the abstract and then there's knowing experientially, and that the human dilemma is that we're always either in the one or the other. And so he gives, as I recall, physical pain as his example. You and I right now at least I hope I'm right in this chase you're not experiencing like adverse physical pain right now and I'm not, so we could kind of put our heads together and we could wax philosophical on and write some really eloquent treaty on what pain is, but we're not experiencing it all, we're to remove from it. But then if, when I finish this podcast and walk out of the church and go down our stairs, if I trip and fall and break my hip, I'll be in the throes of pain, I'll know intimately, directly, immediately, what pain is experientially, but I'll be so deep in it that I couldn't possibly begin to philosophize on or explain what it's about.
Speaker 2:And so Lewis again says that's the dilemma of being human is that we're always in one and don't know what to be able to explain it. Or we're able to know what to explain but we're not in it. And he says that story and in the essay he's talked about myth, but he means story, as we're talking about your fiction that story is the bridge that connects these two things, that in story it's not directly us, but yet we're in the story enough that we are experiencing it, but we're at a remove enough that we're able to know it on that more philosophical, abstract level too. And so what happens then? Is we appropriate it in a way deep down, that's deeper than just when we're reading nonfiction, we're taking in data or we're tracking with an argument, it's actually come inside us and as a part of us, as if it happened to us in a way, and so the reason that this has cash value for us as pastors beyond just cash value as persons is that it means that we come to learn things about the human condition, about human nature and about the complexity of reality that we still wouldn't be able to sit down and stay in the moment. Exactly here's what we know, but yet we know it, we encounter it and we have a way of engaging it that we wouldn't have, or wouldn't have it in a sophisticated and nuanced way, if we hadn't encountered it through the lens of all of this reading and fictional story encounter. So I think that that that, as pastors, we really would do well to spend a little bit more time with, with fiction and not just prioritizing nonfiction.
Speaker 2:I've given a much longer answer than you cared for here, so I'll land the plan by really quickly saying that, generally speaking, I do actually see a little more reading now than I did even four or five years ago, but still it's not nearly what it once upon a time was, and so much of our reading is happening online now and I don't know how deep in the weeds you want to get on that.
Speaker 2:I've got some material in the book about that, but it's not the same thing, and there's so many great books not least Nicholas Carr's book the Shallows that talk about how that kind of reading is quite literally reshaping our brains, and nobody's better on this than Mary and Wolf, her book Reader Come Home and her book Proust and the Squid. I recommend anybody who's listening this if you're interested in just learning how reading and the way we read and the way that we are right now deviating away from kind of long-form linear reading into this distracted, fragmented, fractious online reading is quite literally rewiring the human brain. That has correlative aspects for making us more anxious, more reactionary, making us less patient, less empathetic, less willing to sit in ambiguity all things that we as pastors, in my view, really need to not only demonstrate but be able to share as non-anxious presences for our communities. The ways that we're beginning to read now work against that in ways that are not just philosophical but that are, in fact, neurological and biochemical.
Speaker 1:Certainly there's so many things here. I want to continue exploring this distinction, first of all because I want to get to the way that we're reading, how we're reading, the distinction you make between information and formation. I think that's a really important point. But on the idea of fiction, I couldn't help but think you and I both like to read fiction and nonfiction, have sort of worked in dabbled in fiction and nonfiction. It always feels to me like both in reading and writing there's a limit to what each of them can get you. Nonfiction is a tool I try to use to define something or to give language to something so that people can have a better understanding and better conversations around it. I think a great nonfiction book gives a group of people words as a tool to be able to explore something. But that level of defining always feels like it can slip into being a little clinical. The novel or fiction always gives you the experience itself to live into that experience, but in a way that is often hard to define or to even give words to.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about the topic of fatherhood as you were talking, john Tyson's book, intentional Father really great nonfiction book. But I've also got sort of lurking in my idea of fatherhood Hemingway's Islands in the Stream not one of his better novels, but a great scene where he's out deep sea fishing with his sons on a kind of coming of age moment for the oldest son and him realizing that as a father and how do you? It's certainly not a definition, but somehow both the definition and the novel sort of form into this idea of fatherhood for me. Both of those are sort of deeply in there for me when I think about what it means to be a father. And so it does feel, both from writing but also from reading. There's always a temptation to sort of escape into just fiction and never think critically, and there's also a temptation to always be sort of dissecting and kill the thing on the table in the process that you really need both of these things, sort of moving you into any topic.
Speaker 2:That's so well put. I couldn't agree more with that. And I think that as ministers, we those of us who do a lot of reading we spend most of our time dissecting the thing on the table. And so I say in the book, the pastor's bookshelf, my book that at the end I acknowledge that I've talked a lot about fiction and I say that I foregrounded and not because I read exclusively fiction or even read more fiction. None of that's true. I read more nonfiction. But I think that, as pastors who really see value in reading, that it's that other sphere that we really have a harder time impressing upon our colleagues to do, because it's the one that's been my experience fewer are doing. But I could not possibly agree with you more. I'd say that's a really, really helpful way of thinking about that, the way you just put it.
Speaker 1:Well, part of. I think you make that distinction in the book through the language of information versus formation. One of the concerns I have across the board from ministry and I hear the language creep up a lot in sermons, but it's also true of writing that it's that it's content. Someone will say, oh, you've got such great content, or we think about the sermon as a piece of content, or how can we cut that and make more pieces of content out of it? And that we do slip into a really sort of purely pragmatic, sort of abstract information way of thinking about what it is we're producing and consuming. But you're calling for not just reading for the sake of acquiring more information. You actually see reading as a tool of formation. Maybe you could talk about that distinction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the first core distinction I make in the book and I appreciate you bringing it out and connecting to what we were just saying, because that's exactly what we've been talking about under different language. And that's the first thing I think that folks have to reckon with is considering what the reading act is, and most of us our default sense of what reading is for is we think that it's a purely informational act that we see as kind of our background metaphor for reading not that we sit and think about such a thing, but this is our default is that our brains or computers, and that when we read, we are uploading as much information as possible so that we can then download it and share it whenever the time arises that we would need to. And it's not less than that, it's not not that, but we really need to think of reading as being less than informational act and more a formational act, because so much of what's happening when we are reading to touch back really quickly on the neurological level we're quite literally our brains. Our neurological wiring is being formed and reformed by the way that we read. Our brains are not static. The wiring through neuroplasticity continues to reform and reading is one of the main ways we're not reading that that happens, but then the things that we're reading.
Speaker 2:There's so much that we read that gets inside of us, so to speak, that fills what Fred Craddock used to call the reservoir, but that we don't know that it's getting in there, and a lot of times it's not the stuff that we've even highlighted or starred or underlined in the book, or the thing that when we read it, we thought, oh, I need to go share this with somebody. It's other stuff that just kind of subconsciously, so to speak, got in there, but it continues to fill, and the metaphor that I often use is it's like layer upon layer or lens upon lens over our eyes and the way that we see the world and so the way that it then plays out. This aspect of formation from reading is that just like when we take a picture of something with our smartphone. These days, the technology is so sophisticated that I take a picture, but then I have the option of literally dozens of filters to look at the exact same image through, but each filter that I overlay on that original image, it's bringing out something different from the very thing that I'm looking at. So the thing, the phenomenon in question is not changing, but all these other lenses that I have to look at it. They were causing me to get textures and little accent notes that I otherwise was completely unaware of, and that's what happens through.
Speaker 2:The formative aspect of reading is that all of that stuff is getting inside of us. It's layering the lens through which we see reality, so that it's not as if suddenly it changes the question or the issue or the topic or the thing at hand that we're trying to address or that we're trying to wrestle with or trying to preach on, but it means that we suddenly have all these different layers and textures through which to think about this thing, and so that's far more than just information about that's formation in relationship too, and that's what reading really does. And the thing that I say in the book is one either has to start with that part of the argument and either decide, yeah, I think that's true, I think there's something to that, or say, no, I just I don't think so, but you can't know until you've tried. Is the point that you can't just go read for 30 minutes and then think, okay, well, so how have I been formed? How is this going to be useful in my life or ministry. We can't approach it instrumentally, we have to just trust the process. We have to read by faith and not by sight.
Speaker 2:But over time I've experienced it so many others that I know and have talked to about the significance of reading and ministry have experienced it that over time these things suddenly begin to bubble up.
Speaker 2:They begin to show up and sometimes we don't even know precisely how it showed up, we just have a sense that it did. There's a difference between the times that we're working on a sermon and all of a sudden, unbidden, just the right image or just the right quote or just the right illusion comes to mind. That really serves to tie together what we've been working on in a really rich way and that we hadn't started out with that. We're not trying to shoehorn it in instead of just bubbles up, but for every time that happens, there are three where you're on a visit with somebody and you leave and you realize that there was some way that you were able to engage with that person. That was somehow enriched by all the various encounters that we've had with other things that we've read, and particularly fiction in this regard. But all of that is part of the formational value of reading. That's really important to be our default conception, as opposed to thinking of reading simply as an informational act that will be useful for us in an instrumental way.
Speaker 1:You sort of alluded there, even in your answer to a couple of the chapters in the book, because the idea is not just that I'm sort of forming in some abstract way that never demonstrates itself in reality. You do see that reading has an impact on the minister and the ministry itself. Maybe you could share a little bit through that formation process how reading can impact your preaching and how it can have an impact on pastoral care. I think what you were already alluding to there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my book is broken up into three parts. The first part really is on this point of formation versus information and, through the lens of my own experience and through the lens of other story, trying to make that case. The second part then is if so, great, but so what? Like? How does this map on, practically speaking, to ministry? And so I have chapters on reading for preaching, reading for pastoral care and reading for leadership and Lord. It's been a couple of years now. What is my other one? Reading for vision casting.
Speaker 1:Vision casting. Yep, I've got it, Just opened it up.
Speaker 2:Yep so. And then there are other places. I could have gone with that too, but I didn't want to overly get us too far in the weeds. It's really. Those are to show that once this reservoir has been, over time, continually filled, these things do inevitably begin to show themselves in all spheres of pastoral ministry. And so, as I was just touching on there with preaching, I am not one that thinks that we ought ever to start out with, as readers, something that we've read that was a lovely quote or some great passage, and then work backwards from there to figure out like, okay, how can I embed this in a sermon? So I just say I've never done that. I know, I know most of us who are pastors probably have that are pastor readers, but to me it always seems obvious and always affected. It's there's at least in my own experience with it. There's some ego involved.
Speaker 1:It's like oh, I want to drop this. It's worse than trying to sound like you're a reader from the pulpit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I mean, I've been guilty of it and early on. I think a lot of folks are, and I think it can come from a sincere place. They're like oh man, I want to drop this Hemingway quote in here for people to know I've read this. I want to drop this Dulstayevsky in, but that just. It rings this in it with the rest of the sermon. If you start with that Instead, I think we start with the biblical text prayerfully have whatever our theme or our thesis of the sermon is going to be, and as we're putting it together you know I'm speaking as somebody who's a manuscript preacher, but this holds true for somebody that just has notes and is more extemporaneous these things then bubble up.
Speaker 2:And when it bubbles up that way, it's because suddenly something in our kind of brain and personal formation and through the power of the spirit bubbles up because it's the exact right thing for the point that we're making. And Mark Twain has a line that's something to the effect of the difference between lightning and the lightning bug is all the difference in the world. And it's the same thing with when you, when you hear, or, as a pastor, when you provide something from reading that came out that way because it suddenly was the exact right fit for what you were trying to say, versus starting out with the thing that's going to sound really intellectual or really well read or something and work backwards from there. So that happens in preaching, and it's not just quotes, it's scenes to be able to reference. The way you just even reference the Hemingway. I mean you just it's not like you and I knew we were going to talk about this that just bubbled up and it was the perfect reference for the point that you're trying to make. Like you can't start with wanting to have that, it just has to be there.
Speaker 2:So references, illusions, even cadences, and the way that we write, you know the way how much we read and the kind of things we read and evidently begin to influence just the way that we use language to communicate, some of that stuff begins to come through. You know, I don't think I'll ever fully be able to know how much GK Chesterton is involved in my sermons, but I see how often I use paradox as a rhetorical device and once upon a time I didn't do that and I have to think that to some degree because I've read so much GK Chesterton in my life. So all this stuff comes through that way, but when we're on pastoral visits things that we've learned as readers there's a very helpful metaphor for pastoral care and I think that there are lots of metaphors that we ought to operate out of as pastoral caregivers, but one of those useful ones is Charles Gworkin's idea of people as living human documents and that we engage folks like living human documents that we're in a sense reading. We can't be good readers of living human. We can only become better readers of living human documents if we are attending to literary written documents and story. The more that we read story, the more that we're able to begin to connect threads and see themes and notice motifs from things that folks that when we're visiting over and over again, it begins to bubble up. And we get this amazing gift as pastors to try to help folks do that which the vast majority of us never do, which is really try to form a coherent whole out of our myriad life experiences that seem so disjointed, and we get the opportunity to try to help put it all in the context of seeing where the threads of the Holy Spirit have been pulling these things together. Our reading, particularly our fictional reading, helps us with that as pastoral caregivers. It gives us insight into how better to be leaders with our staff, with our committees, and it certainly helps with vision casting.
Speaker 2:I mean, one of the things in terms of my deep belief and already, but not yet eschatology is that we've got these signposts that we've been given through the Old Testament prophets and through the incarnation of Jesus and the things that he embodied and the things he said and the parables he told and certainly not least, and the depictions we have of the resurrection. We don't have the slightest clue, an exhaustive understanding of what things will be like in the consummated kingdom of God. But we've got these little foretastes and we've got to go back to that buzzword content. We've got some insight into little crumbs of content and so reading then there's so much from reading, in particular when you go back to some of that nonfiction you're talking about, when we read about various injustices in the world and ways that, as Neal Plannock would say, things just simply are not the way they're supposed to be, we suddenly get this heightened ability, the cast division, for how to make some small difference and then how to connect that to not just being some arbitrary good work but work that's connected because it's a signpost for the coming kingdom of God, because it's in some way prefiguring what it is that God has planned for the fulfillment of all things.
Speaker 2:So reading, I think, really gives us a deeper lease on how to do that as pastors. So all of this is in that reservoir that we're talking about. But it doesn't just stay there. It's not just an abstract kind of thought experiment that I put forward. It then does cash out in ministry. We just can't do it instrumentally to say I'm doing it because it's going to help me. In this way, we read and just trust that it will, and I've written this book because I really believe it will.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about this temptation of trying to appear like somebody who reads, which is always a temptation. I have a little rule that I want to be more well read than people think I am, which is not really a goal, it's just a check on the opposite, which is people thinking I'm more well read than I am, which becomes a temptation. So a little check. I want to ask a question, that kind of a more practical question how do you go about choosing what to read next? So, in this formation process, this trusting of the process that reading is going to develop these things in you, how intentional are you? How do you have a system? How do you make decisions about what books to pick up?
Speaker 2:My answer to this question is always so unsatisfying, give it anyway. So Alan Jacobs is the one that coined the term that I use in the book that I really advocate folks reading by whim. Now I, because folks love to have recommendations, I always have standby recommendations, but part of my, my belief about reading is that just because a book was meaningful to me as a person in general, as a minister in particular, even as similarly wired as it seems like you and I are chased like that, doesn't mean it's going to do the same thing for you. You know that. I think that there's there's really something about the Holy Spirit's movement when it comes to our reading. So I'm not nearly as married as I once upon a time was to having a list and wanting to burn through this list. I always have a list of books that that I've seen and that I'm interested in reading, but I will continue to deviate off from that to read something that just out of nowhere beckons me the example that I give in the book.
Speaker 2:That's the one that I have for years given prior to writing this book, which is John Updykes A Prayer for Owen Meany. These days it's one of my top 15 favorite novels, but for years I would hear about how great a prayer for Owen Meany was and I had a sense of what the book was about and lots of my kind of literary friends swore by this book and I just knew I was supposed to like this book and I ended up getting it at a used bookstore for like two dollars and being like score and getting back to the house and reading the first 150 pages and finally it just being complete, concrete and I just couldn't do anything for me and so I put it on the shelf. And then some time went by and in conversation with bookish friends, up comes a prayer for Owen Meany again. Oh it's an amazing book, yoss, and you particularly would love this book and think, all right, I got to try it again, pick it up and I read it. I get about 150 pages in and I would always stall out at 150 pages. I probably did that a handful of times.
Speaker 2:But then one day I had gone to find a different book on my shelf and the spine of a prayer for Owen Meany suddenly grabbed me. I don't know why, but whatever reason, I just picked it up and began to read that same first page that I had read so many times. But that day, for whatever reason, I was like butter and I read the second page and read third, and about 30 minutes later, you know, I was 30 pages in and I had sat down and I was reading it and finally I realized you want to know what? I'm not going to go read that book I thought I was going to read. Now I'm reading this book and I burned through the 600 plus pages of that book and, you know, in no time, relatively speaking, and I cite it regularly and it's a book that I absolutely cherish in a door but, for whatever reason, it just was never the right time until it was, and I've had that experience so many times.
Speaker 2:And so I think there's there's never any telling when the spirit will nudge us toward a book.
Speaker 2:We might find it anywhere, it might come to us through any manner of random means, but books tend to find us at just the right time.
Speaker 2:And so, less than having a process I have the encouragement of, unless you are just constitutionally wired in such a way that once you started something you can't stop until you finish and I know that there are people who are wired that way and I'm not encouraging people go against their given constitution.
Speaker 2:But for the rest of us, if you're not into a book, or even if something is working for you but something else is called and you're just really drawn to it, don't feel like you have to slog through the one before you can get to the other. I always have at least one novel going and several different works of nonfiction going at the same time, and one of the things that studies have shown is that this is actually a benefit, because the brain naturally begins to try to draw connections between these disparate things that it's taking in, and that causes us then to appropriate and sublimate that stuff in ways that might not happen as readily if we're only burning through the one book at hand. So that when I learned that that actually affirmed a practice that I'd begun doing just because I was doing it, I think that's a great opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a list that I recommend, but really it's more an encouragement. Just read and just follow the whim and don't try to hyper control when and what you read, because it's like getting into Narnia. There are any number of portals into Narnia. The only way to know for sure you're not going to get in is by trying. So just just trust by reading around you're going to keep getting it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think if you could take the guilt out of what you're supposed to be reading or not finishing something reading, people would just do a lot more reading if they didn't feel guilty about a starting and stopping or picking something else up. I'm also a big fan of if you find something you like, read everything you can, right. If you find an author that resonates with you, just work, read it all, deep, dive into that. That's. Some of the greatest joy for me is just reading through one author and everything they've written.
Speaker 2:That's my favorite yeah, some of my favorite times, when you find that.
Speaker 1:I do want to give you a chance to talk about, because one of the parts in the book I think is really compelling as well too, is your. Your dogged about reading a paper physical copy of a book. Maybe unpack that a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I always want to throw the disclaimer or the kind of qualify around that studies show that 1 does not have to be reading the physical copy for a lot of these same things that I'm talking about to happen. It can happen on an e-reader or anything like that. I just am old school in that way. But I really like to read with a pencil in hand. I do have a notation system that I abide by. I do recommend folks have a system. It doesn't have to be mine, but reading with pencil in hand, both for nonfiction and fiction, I think is absolutely critical and crucial. But yeah, I like having the tangible copy. I like it being around in the background my eye and voluntarily catching the spine.
Speaker 2:I'm looking around my office right now. I mean their countless books that just sit there is the background furniture of my life, but they're part of my autobiography and I think that the actual, the copy of the book is significant. The place where we read the book is significant. The time carved out is significant. All of those things are part of the formation process and they become a part of us. So not only do I have a relationship with some of these physical copies of books that I see around here. I have a connection to the physical place where I read so many of these books. I think that's one of the under discussed aspects of reading. Chase, I don't know if you would agree with that, but the connection, the association of place with a book is so rich for readers.
Speaker 1:Yeah that's really interesting. I just had Andrew Root on the podcast and I was talking about his series the Pastor and a Secular Age and I joked with him that I first read the book on a cruise my wife and I were on and he was laughing about that strange reading material. But to your point, I remember sitting on the balcony and that book sort of flipping some switches for me, and yeah, I know exactly where I was when I was reading it and what it was I was reading at the time.
Speaker 2:Well, so I'm glad you can relate to that, and nobody's a bigger fan of the world than Andy Root, and I actually just reread Faith Formation of Secular Age at the lake.
Speaker 1:So I just had that exact experience. Weird in the same way, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly no, but that's exactly it, I mean, and once you've read the book you're connected to that and I have the richest memories and associations with lots of different books. I mean, I've got this beautifully rich association of Ethan Canan's novel America, america with the resort my wife and I stayed at for our honeymoon, and then this connection with Jonathan Fransen's freedom from the airplane flying home, because I just finished America, america and it just started freedom, and that was a wonderful pair of books to read back to back. But that's just. Those are two examples of quite literally thousands that I have.
Speaker 2:Just if I think about the Bahamas and I think about my honeymoon, I think about so many things. But one of the things I also think about is my wife, april, out reading a book beside me. Well, I'm reading Ethan Canan's book and I just I think that's a part of reading that's significant and that doesn't. We don't lose that. I wouldn't say with something that's not a physical copy but it's so bound to the physical copy. That's one of the things that I don't want to lose.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really, really helpful concept and idea and in your system you go into it and explore it more in the book on how you mark and keep track of what you're reading, and I think there's a lot to be learned. But one of my favorite parts of the book maybe a way as we sort of wrap up this conversation is and I don't know how I missed this in scripture before too, but it really struck me the way you set it up. I'm just gonna read one paragraph from the one section from the end of the book. I think it's the last page. You write writing to Timothy.
Speaker 1:His beloved disciple, paul, the pastor reader Par excellence, says do your best to come to me soon. When you come, bring my books. I've certainly read that many times, but something about you putting it here in this context made me realize that this idea of being a pastor reader is not something new. But it stretches back all the way to the foundations of us being people of the book, us as pastors, long having given our lives, dedicated our lives to reading as an act of ministry. To begin with, a really helpful final image how it strikes you, what it means for you to be finally, in the line of Paul, a pastor reader.
Speaker 2:He is the par reader, pastor ex-Alanza site, him, and, as a contemporary model, eugene Peterson. They're the two models for me of being pastor readers. And I owe that connection to a minister friend, phil Majors, from when I was living in Corbyn, kentucky, when I was just telling them about my deep conviction. At the time I didn't have the contract for this book, I hadn't even started working on this as my thesis for my doctoral work, which is what this grows out of, by the way. But in hearing it he had said oh, it reminds me of that line from Paul to Timothy where he says bring me my books. And I thought, oh, my God, that is so rich, that is so beautiful and that has stuck with me ever since. So thanks to Phil Majors for saying that. And we see it in acts and it comes through in his various epistles too, that Paul's reading, that his educational formation through reading, was one of his vital tools for the way that he went about the work of Christian ministry. I mean he could speak conversantly and unanxiously on all the various philosophical schools of the present day and he was steeped in the Hebrew scriptures and he certainly had understanding of kind of Latin rhetoric and all kinds of things that comes through in the way that he preaches and writes.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I say in that last chapter that you're talking about there is that when you are deeply read these cadences and the things that we read, they come through oftentimes in ways that we don't even realize is happening, because they just become kind of the lingua franca out of which we speak or that we put thought into expression.
Speaker 2:There's an example that I give in that same chapter that I got from Richard Hayes book Reading Backwards, where he talks about how and I'd never read this until Hayes book but it says that Arthur Miller the playwright, early on when he was beginning to try to form his voice, would sit with the collected works of Shakespeare and just out loud type those collected words of Shakespeare, the collected plays of works of Shakespeare, over and over again in his typewriter. And the whole reason was to try to get Shakespeare's language and rhythm and the cadences and all of this just so deeply embedded in him that when he began to write that these things just came out, that they were part of the form that his own expression would take. And when we're avid readers this stuff just inevitably comes out that way and that's one of the ways we see Paul as being the pastor reader par excellence is because so much of what he's read just comes out in ways that he didn't even necessarily intend for it to when writing or speaking.
Speaker 1:Well, the book we've been talking about is the pastor's bookshelf, why reading matters for ministry and I highly recommend the book. The other great thing any book that makes me wanna pick up other books and read is certainly one that I value, and this one has plenty of recommendations. You'll find all sorts of new things to read in addition to this book itself. Austin, really, I'm grateful for the book, grateful for the conversation, looking forward to hopefully more things in the future, for I'm using We'll have an excuse to do this again.
Speaker 2:What joy it's been and I look forward to it. Chase, Thanks so much. ["the Book We've Been Discussing"].
Speaker 1:As always, you can find show notes for today's episode by going to pastorwritercom. There on the website, you'll find information about Austin, as well as the book we've been discussing. And while you're there, you might check out the new print study guide for the Five Masculine Instincts. If you've read the book previously and you're looking for ways to use the book in a group setting or just for deeper personal reflection, the new print study guide has access to the assessment, to personal reflection questions, group discussion questions, as well as some new content chapter introductions as well. I hope you'll check that out. You can do that through the pastorwriter website, but also by going to the fivemasculineinstinctscom as always. Thanks for listening. Until next time. ["the Book We've Been Discussing"]. ["the Book We've Been Discussing"]. ["the Book We've Been Discussing"]. ["the Book We've Been Discussing"].