Thoughts on Winning the Book of the Year Award
The first award any of my books have won!
The Englewood Review of Books has named LOVING DISAGREEMENT the BOOK OF THE YEAR!
The Englewood Review of Books is a weekly blog/email that reviews books.
As they say on their website:
”We focus on covering books related to the themes of community, mission, imagination, and reconciliation, and hope to cultivate a vision of Reading for the Common Good, a way of reading that is driven primarily not by one’s personal desires but by an attentiveness to the communities in which we are embedded: church, family, neighborhood, workplace.”
This is a huge honor to both me and Kathy. I really respect the Englewood Review of Books. Some of those year-end “best book of the year” lists are pay-to-play popularity competitions1, but the ERB reads books carefully and with intention.
So I am THRILLED (and not a small bit flattered) that our book was their book of the year.
At the same time it’s enormously humbling, and I can’t help but think of the many, many excellent books that came out this year and realize how difficult it is to say that any one book is “the best.”
But also: I am so thankful that the hard work that Kathy and I (and a number of other people) have put into this book has been recognized by a review site that I have such high regard for, and whose mission is so resonant for both of us.
If you haven’t read the BOOK OF THE YEAR for 2023, you can always buy a copy from our favorite local bookstore (yes, they have it in stock, and yes they will ship it to you!) or from the Corporate Overlords.
THREE podcasts I was on this week!
Kathy was on all three of them as well!
On the Created For podcast, Kathy Khang and I talk about LOVING DISAGREEMENT, finding joy, how to deal with violence in the world, and what gives us hope. The Created For team has also put together some reflection questions, some thoughts on spiritual disciplines and a full transcript here!
We also had an interview on 20 Minute Takes, the podcast of Christians for Social Action, hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto. You might notice that we went a little more like thirty-two minutes, but hey there were two of us it’s fine!
Meanwhile, on our podcast, we hosted Dr. Sandra Glahn to talk about her new book NOBODY’S MOTHER. It’s a really fascinating dive into what exactly the Bible means when it says “women will be saved by childbearing.” Dr. G argues that if we understand who Artemis of the Ephesians is, we’ll understand what Paul meant when he wrote that! It’s a very compelling and fascinating book and conversation.
Neat stuff
Did you know you can register for a “personal account” and get 100 free articles a month from JSTOR? JSTOR is a digital research library that has journal articles, books, and other information on file. There are also LOTS of primary sources you can access there.
I used it a lot when I was writing The Great C.S. Lewis reread, especially when I was double-checking to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any scholarly toes out there with my articles.
Back from the dead
They’ve been promising for years that the dodo would be making a comeback.
Dodos are extinct, largely because humans “hunted” them to death (though we also brought a whole lot of invasive species which ate their eggs or killed them, too). I put hunted in quotes because they weren’t much of a sport — they had no natural fear of human beings — and people didn’t like eating them2. Apparently they were just pretty fun to kill.
European sailors first saw and killed dodos in the early 1500s and by the late 1600s they saw the last one and looked around and were like, “Wait, guys, did we kill all of them?”
The dodo became a pretty big symbol of the reality that human beings can cause extinction events for other plants and animals.
Well, recently a paleobiologist managed to sequence the entire dodo genome (we have a very, very small bit of dodo soft tissue still) as well as the genome of the dodo’s nearest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon.
To massively simplify things: scientists will edit some “primordial germ cells” of a Nicobar pigeon to match those of a dodo, will inject those into a sterile rooster and chicken, who will make sweet love (they won’t be sterile anymore once they get the edited PGC!) and get a very large and strange baby when that egg hatches… a baby dodo!
Will this work?
Maybe! It’s already been tried out with living birds, and somewhere out there is a duck who gave birth to a chicken3.
Read all about the plan to de-extinctify the dodos here.
If Michael Crichton were still alive he would be shaking his head right now and telling us, “It starts with the dodos… next it will be velociraptors4.”
Look at that thick winter coat on Bruce!
Bruce got a pedicure this week. Since he lives mostly outside he keeps his nails pretty well clipped, but they were getting a little long. I actually found a lady who does house calls and gave him a much better nail clipping than the occasional one I give him. I don’t think he was happy, but I sure was!
Also, there sure are a lot of beautiful things in this world. Here’s a blue heron I saw near our house this week.
I hope you see some beautiful things in the week to come!
Peace,
Matt
Believe me, I would still brag if I got one.
The Dutch called them walghvogel, which means “tasteless birds.”
Seems like A LOT of work to make a Minecraft joke in the real world, but hey, scientists have to entertain themselves somehow.
We will almost certainly get mammoths before we get any dinosaurs.
Congratulations on the book award! What a great Christmas present for you!
Congrats on winning book of the year! It seems like a very timely read indeed.