Make New Friends with New Books

Anticipated reading in 2024

After teaching only a graduate course online each year for the past 3-4 years, I am excited to be jumping back into the undergraduate classroom where I am re-reading books that I love. These books appear strange on a list for 2024 reads, but I stick tight to C.S. Lewis’s advice that “for every new book you should read three old books.”

In Pepperdine’s four-semester Great Books sequence, I am teaching the final course covering the modern era from the late 1800s until now. We started the semester with “Nondum,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a recommendation from my friend Dr. Doug Henry (Dean of Baylor’s Honors Program), who gushed that it’s one of his favorites. The poem opens with a pronounced silence from God (“Our prayer seems lost in desert ways/ Our hymn in the vast silence dies”) as the poet laments the violent factions fighting in God’s name (“whilst Thy world/ Contends about its many creeds/ And hosts confront with flags unfurled/ And zeal is flushed and pity bleeds”). Students probably worried about a semester that began with attention to pain and darkness.

Spring Reading List 2024

However, I emphasized that this post-1800s world is one in which Hegel has announced, “God is dead.” Now what? What are the options as we navigate life in a world that has not only permitted such blasphemy but also, in many cases, believes it? Then comes Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky… the big, enduring questions are already being explored every week. I’m loving it!