Here are some of my personal highlights from the past year:
Travel highlight: visiting Calvin’s Geneva in July
Dining highlight: eating a perfect wood-fired pizza in a cosy little Italian restaurant in northern France
Movie: the Aussie film Look Both Ways
Documentary: the Martin Scorsese film about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home
Music: the release of Bob Dylan’s Live at the Gaslight 1962
Fiction: reading Susanna Clarke’s fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Poetry: reading Kevin Hart’s Flame Tree: Selected Poems
Theology: reading the new translations of Eberhard Busch’s The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology and Wolf Krötke’s Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth.
New Testament: reading the special issue on the resurrection in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus
Old Testament: reading John Goldingay’s Old Testament Theology, Vol. 1
Autobiographies: reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles and Hans Küng’s My Struggle for Freedom
Thanks to all of you who have been reading this blog throughout 2005. I wish you a very happy New Year.
Happy New Year Ben, have fun at the beach!
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year to you too, Ben!
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for your latest hilarious suggestions for a new name for my blog. I'm spoilt for choice ...
Ok, I'm jealous . . . you got to visit Geneva thia past year?
ReplyDeleteI've always wanted to travel there.
(as well as to Italy)
I just wanted to say thanks for the Kevin Hart mention. I'm into poetry, but had not heard of him. "The Last Day," is particularly good. Perhaps I can return the favor. Here are a few I've run across in my readings:
ReplyDeleteCanaan, by Geoffrey Hill
Fire or Fire, by Roseanne Coggeshall
The Gilded Lapse of Time (or Supernatural Love -- a compilation), by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Thanks again.
Hey Ben,
ReplyDeleteI was in Geneva when I was around twenty. I remember thinking, "Golly, my mother would love this place. It's so clean you could eat off the streets!"
Around ten years ago, a colleague who visited the city brought me back an "I Love Calvin" t-shirt - with a little red heart on it! I used to wear it proudly to synods and the like - even though it was too small. I covet another one!
My books of the year:
George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003)(which I only discovered in New York last January. American Calvinists are not big in Pelagian Britain!).
A couple of collections of Herbert McCabe's essays, talks, sermons (the late McCabe was terribly lazy about publishing).
As for best novel I read, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
Purple Hibiscus (2004).
Cheers, everyone!
Here's to another year of God's patience and grace!