Do not read only white men in the new year
A few weeks ago I began to plan my 2021 list of books to read. As some of you know, I just finished my Master’s degree in Christian Apologetics from Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Thus, I will be able to read what I want, and not just assigned readings in the new year. Do not get me wrong, I really liked (most of) the readings I had to do during the graduate program, but it’s really nice to choose what you are going to read.
One of the things that I wanted to do this year was to divide my readings by themes. This was an idea from a Brazilian Youtuber (and pastor) that I follow (pedromcp@ on Twitter), and I really liked it. It is easy to become lost in a large variety of topics and even more when you add daily news and tweets to the subjects you are studying, so keeping these main topics in your head is helpful. These were the themes that I chose for the following year:
- Biblical studies: focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus;
- Biblical commentaries: focus on New Testament texts;
- Philosophy (ethics, philosophy of religion, and epistemology): some 20th century ethics that analyze older philosophers, but also 19th century existentialism with some original texts from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, for example;
- Practical theology: focus on the topic of justice, especially around Black Christianity in America;
- Church history: focus on the Reformation period and everything after that;
- 19th century Russian literature: connected with the existentialists that I will be reading in the Philosophy theme.
OK, you might be saying: but these are a lot of themes, will that actually help? I believe so. Even though I ended up with more topics than I imagined, it still gives me the ability to connect all the books I’m reading. For example, I’m not reading *everything* from philosophy, but focused on a few topics within it. And I even connected my philosophy reading with the literature part. Now we need to go from these themes to the actual books and authors to read.
How do you choose the books and authors?
This part is more related to the title of this post. The next step of this process was to start with a few authors that I knew I liked, e.g. N. T. Wright, Timothy Keller, William Lane Craig. Then, I started searching on Google or Amazon about books covering the topics that I wanted. At the end, I had a list of 60+ books, many more than I planned to read in a year (my original goal was 24), but still fine.
That seems to be a straightforward way to choose the books and authors, doesn’t it? Not really.
I realized that more than 95% of the books I chose were written by white men. That didn’t seem right. Some may be tempted to say that truth is truth, no matter if it is a white man or black woman that is affirming that thing. And you are correct. However, they may be asking different questions about the world around them, and that’s important. Esau McCaulley says this beautifully in his book Reading While Black, but in the context of Bible reading:
“Everybody has been reading the Bible from their locations, but we [Black Christians] are honest about it. What makes Black interpretation Black, then, are the collective experiences, customs, and habits of Black people in this country… If our experiences pose particular and unique questions to the Scriptures, then the Scriptures also pose unique questions to us.” [1]
Stating it differently, authors from diverse backgrounds will bring different questions to the topic. Those questions are crucial to understand the topic as a whole, and not just a particular viewpoint in it. That said, I am not saying that authors from different backgrounds have their own truths. I do believe that there are true propositions about the state of the world independent of the person who is affirming them. On the other hand, if you only read white men, you are, for sure, only asking questions about a certain part of the topic.
In current times, you must be intentional about reading books from authors of diverse backgrounds, I don’t think there is any excuse for not doing that. It is known that our own circles will make us read or interact with others in the same circle. Besides, if you are not intentional and just go with whatever your Google or Amazon searches give you, you are probably going to read only white men. That’s simply because white men were virtually the only ones permitted to do actual study and writing until last century and that creates a snowball effect that is hard to overcome.
So, what did I do? I started to look for some folks that I already followed on Twitter and tried to find their recommendations about these authors. Then, I started to search specifically for women and people of color that wrote about the topics I had already chosen. At the end, I was able to decrease the percentage of white men authors to less than 50%. The women and people of color are still concentrated in a much smaller number of books and pages in total, though, which means I still have work to do.
[1] Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black, 20.
Finally another post in this blog, right? I plan to start reading much more frequently here now that I finished my Masters. Hopefully I will go back to write summaries of the books I’m reading and occasional essays about topics of my interest that are related to our daily lives.
The topics that I had in my mind were:
- Conspiracy theories, how the Marvel movies play an important role in them, and gnosticism
- Divisions in the church because of politics, people trying to find heresy in the other, and the apostolic creeds
Please, comment below or reply on Twitter saying which of these topics do you think is the best.
