This reflection was written by the College’s principal, the Rev. Dr. Jesse Zink, for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community. You will find reflections from previous weeks here.

A visitor to my office recently remarked, “You’ve got a lot of books in here!” I don’t deny it. I prune my collection every summer but shelf space is still a hot commodity. The comment was prompt for me to reflect on the place of books in ministry.

The most important building block for a vital ministry is a robust theological imagination. Reading is one significant way in which we develop, enhance, transform, and renew that imagination. It happens in reading the Bible, of course, but also in reading the ideas of those who travel the way of Jesus with us. It also happens in reading novels, history, social science, poetry and much more that open to us just a little bit more the mystery of what it means to be a person set in the midst of God’s good creation. We put all of this material in dialogue with the experience of our lives and in that combination find God powerfully at work.

Here’s something I’ve said to many of you in the past: you can’t read everything. This is true of the syllabuses for your courses. It’s true of my office as well. I haven’t read every word of every book on my shelves. But just because you can’t read everything doesn’t mean you should read nothing. Part of learning is learning how to read. I engage with the books in my office in many differing ways—sometimes by reading the entirety of the text but often by reading a chapter, scanning the index, or even just looking at the chapter titles and how the argument is presented.

I hope that you will keep reading after your formal studies are complete. There’s nothing more disappointing in visiting a clergy person and being able to guess when they were in seminary by the books on their shelves. It’s okay to buy and read new books! But whatever you read, I hope you will keep reading actual books after you are done with your studies. In today’s world, the Google search bar and the ChatGPT prompt screen are powerful invitations to think that all the learning we need can be found online and that all the reading we do should be found on the Internet. That is simply not true. I have a shelf close to my desk of the books I use most regularly.

After the Bible, the two books I probably most enjoy spending time with are my gospel parallel and Concordance. Perhaps that says something about me and my interests but I find there is nothing so rewarding or stretching of my faith as to sit with passages of Scripture and uncover what the authors were saying then and how it speaks to me now. Google simply does not get me there.

Finally, I hope you have some books whose memory lingers with you long after you are done with them. For me, a couple such books are Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, Rowan Williams’ Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, and Alan Kreider’s The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. They don’t say everything that need to be said about Christianity. But sometimes it feels like part of my life as Christian is a dialogue with these books and others like them. I keep them close by in my office and it can feel like being surrounded by old friends. Perhaps that, more than any other reason, is why I have so many books in my office. If you were to make a similar list, what books would be on your list?

Faithfully yours,
Jesse Zink
Principal