Reading & Contemplation | “The Pastor’s Bookshelf” with Austin Carty

Shownotes:

We often look at books as a way into getting more information, but today’s guest, Rev. Austin Carty, looks at reading as a way of deeper formation. To him, reading--especially fiction--is a way to deepen our well of empathy, of relating to one another with kindness and charity. Even if we don’t realize that what we’re reading is impacting our lives, Austin believes that it is. For those of us who aren’t readers, Austin simply asks that we treat it like any hobby. Carve out dedicated time--30 minutes to an hour--each day and trust that what you’re reading is having a positive impact on the formation of that well of wisdom.

Austin Carty is the Pastor of Boulevard Baptist Church in Anderson, South Carolina. He is a former high school English teacher and earned degrees from High Point University and Wake Forest University.

Resources:

Follow Austin on Twitter and Facebook

Purchase his book “The Pastor’s Bookshelf” here.

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01 I'm Chris McAlilly.

Eddie Rester 00:02

Welcome to The Weight. We are so glad you're with us. We've got a great guest today, Austin Carty who's written a book called "The Pastor's Bookshelf." Chris, he's an English major turned pastor. You're an English major turned pastor. What'd you take away from this one?

Chris McAlilly 00:18

That this guy could be my friend. That was what I took away from it. Yeah, he's speaking my language. I mean, I think that's just personally, but I think for you guys, I think it's just a good reminder of the power of reading, of how powerful a book can be. A book is not just a, you know, container of words and information. It really is a living conversation between two people across time. It's an ancient but beautiful form of being in relationship with other people. And it contains, I think, wisdom, not just information.

Eddie Rester 00:59

Yeah. I was thinking, I didn't get to talk about it much in the episode, but John Wesley wrote a letter to one of his pastors and he opened the letter with these words, "What has exceedingly hurt you in time past, nay and I fear to this day, is want of reading." And I think as you listen to Austin talk about what reading does for us and to us and in us, is just an invitation again, to find what you love to read and begin to let it do its work in you.

Chris McAlilly 01:33

Yeah, thank you all for being a part of the conversation, always. This continues our series on reading and contemplation. If you haven't heard some of those other conversations, go back and listen to them and just keep, you know, go ahead and follow us. Like the podcast. Share it with your friends, and we would love for you to be a part of the growing community of people who love The Weight.

Eddie Rester 01:58
Who love The Weight. Thank you for being with us.

Eddie Rester 02:00

[INTRO] Life can be heavy. We carry around with us the weight of our doubt, our pain, our suffering, our mental health, our family system, our politics. This is a podcast to create space for all of that.

Chris McAlilly 02:14

We want to talk about these things with humility, charity, and intellectual honesty. But more than that, we want to listen. It's time to open up our echo chamber. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 02:29
Well, we're here today with Austin Carty. Austin, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Austin Carty 02:34
What a joy to be with y'all. Thanks for having me.

Eddie Rester 02:37

So Austin, you're in Anderson, South Carolina. How long have you been in Anderson, South Carolina?

Austin Carty 02:42
A few weeks ago, which, at the time of this recording would be late July, marked three years.

Eddie Rester 02:52
Okay. And I think I read somewhere before you were a pastor, you were an English teacher. Is that right? Or English professor?

Austin Carty 02:59
I was an English teacher. I taught high school 10th and 11th grade English for a few years.

Eddie Rester 03:04
Okay. So your major in college? Were you an English major? I'm trying to connect you to Chris here because he was an English major.

Austin Carty 03:11

Yeah, I was once I got my act together and figured out what I was interested in and what I wanted to do. I was originally a communications major. I left college for a few years, bounced around, did several different things. That's a whole other story and an entirely different podcast. But once I returned to school, it was because I'd rediscovered my love for reading. And at that point, it was very clear to me that I wanted to be a literature major.

Chris McAlilly 03:36
How did you become a pastor? How did that happen?

Austin Carty 03:39

Well, honestly, it was via reading. Um, that's a much longer more complicated story than this. But the first stirrings of my call to ministry were when I was teaching a Leo Tolstoy short story in my 11th grade English class. There was a moment teaching the story, "The Long Exile," which is short story that Stephen King actually based "The Shawshank Redemption" on. It's a story of somebody who's unjustly convicted of a crime and spends his life and Siberia, hence the title "The Long Exile." And it's a book that just speaks of injustice. And at the very end of the book, the protagonist, this this character Aksionov is actually permitted, he's going to be freed. And he's just granted this radical act of forgiveness to the man who really did commit the crime that Aksionov spent his whole life as the one being penalized for. And the very end of the story, then the warden comes to the to the jail cell, and they find Aksionov dead. The end.

Austin Carty 04:50

And the kids were just completely irate, which caught me completely off guard because how many great stories that we read together, and few if any of those there'd really be much kind of interest or energy around. But with that one, with that particular ending, their sense of justice had just been completely upended. And they weren't going to take it lightly. And so it occasioned this conversation that I really had not planned on forgiveness and the power of forgiveness and what withholding forgiveness does to us, which is, you know, the point Tolstoy is making in the story. But there's really no way to kind of overstate how pivotal that moment was for me, because as I was kind of facilitating that conversation, I was just alive. I don't really know how else to put it. It was like all aspects of what made me tick were being called to the fore in that moment. And that day ended, and I just began doing this self assessment. What was that? And I'll spare you the much longer story. But that's really when I began discerning and sensing this call to go to divinity school, which led ultimately to the ministry.

Chris McAlilly 06:03

Don't you think the ministry is constraining, though? You know, I mean, the stories that can be told in a church and the stories that can be told outside of a church. I assume a high school is constraining in certain ways, too. But do you find it harder to engage people with stories about honest, sure enough, you know, human stuff within the context of the church? Or on the opposite side, do you find it to actually be a place where some of those deep desires have really flourished?

Austin Carty 06:36

Well, it's a great question. And I think it's a both-and. And I really kind of see literature as an inroad, in many ways. Because the way that literature functions for me as a minister, are in a couple of different levels. There's, yes, there's kind of public presentation of a book, whether that's somehow embedded in a sermon or an invitation for a group to be reading a novel together. And then, you know, that's almost kind of self selecting. Most folks that our readers are the ones that gravitate toward those kinds of offerings and other folks that then don't.

Austin Carty 07:14

But then there's also another level, which is the one-on-one, which is you're in conversation with someone on a visit or you know, getting coffee or lunch, and something in the conversation suddenly sparks the memory of a book, and you're able to connect that to the conversation. You're recommending that book. And then the next thing you know, you follow up and you have a conversation about that book. And that's then invited somebody into a story. And then there may be conversations on some topics that they might not have found themself comfortable talking about, certainly wouldn't necessarily been a book they found themselves just reading of their own accord. But it then does open up avenues for conversation that might be harder to get into otherwise.

Eddie Rester 08:01

You know, your book, "The Pastor's Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry," you make the point, and John Wesley actually wrote a letter to another pastor, to one of his pastors about this, that we are impoverished, that, as pastors, if we don't read, and impoverished as people if we don't read, and I put that up against what's going on in culture right now. There's an article from earlier this year, Americans are reading fewer books than in the past, almost three books less than we were reading back in 2016. They attribute that to the heavy readers particularly are reading less books now. So it almost feels like as you're calling us to read, you're swimming upstream right now. Have you felt that with other people, that as you've talked about this book, or as you've talked to other pastors, or even your church members, people seem to be just reading less?

Austin Carty 09:02

Yeah, that's demonstrably true, and it's not just in others. We can even feel it in ourselves as readers shaped by the culture we're in because it can be harder to discipline ourselves to even stay the pace that we want to stay as readers because there's so many other forms of entertainment. And then we also need to clarify and kind of define our terms of what we even mean by reading because, you know, so much of what we kind of let pass for reading is reading on our phones or on our computers, to where there have been all kinds of empirical studies that show that what's happening there isn't necessarily reading in kind of a linear sense. It's kind of the eyes kind of go to different places on the screen, and then you're clicking on hyperlinks, and you're not doing kind of old fashioned linear reading that has specific kind of cognitive effects.

Austin Carty 09:51

And when you're doing this other type of kind of fragmented, fractious, disjointed reading, that also has cognitive effects. There are now kind of empirical cognitive studies that show what those different things do, to our brains and to us, from a neuroplasticity standpoint. And one of the things we lose when we're doing less and less long form linear reading, we lose our capacities for empathy, for appreciation of ambiguity, for commitment to critical thinking. And we kind of always assumed to these things, but now cognitive neuroscience is actually empirically showing that this is that this is true.

Austin Carty 10:38

And one other thing I'd kind of add to that, to get out of the neuroscientific weeds and make it a little bit more 50,000 foot level, most of us have a default understanding of reading as reading being an informational act, which is to say, even though most of us probably don't sit down and think of our brain with any sort of metaphor, we have an unexamined sense that our brains are like a computer, and that when we're reading, we are uploading information to our hard drive, so that whenever we might need it, we can then dispense of it, at will. And certainly there is all kinds of informational benefit when we read. But that's a really impoverished and reduced way of thinking about reading. Reading is far more formational than it is informational. And so when we are gravitating away from doing a lot of reading, what we are quite literally doing to ourselves is reducing a capacity for formation.

Austin Carty 11:46

Because with everything that we're reading, whether we can regurgitate it or not--which 90% of what we read, we cannot--but it's all getting inside. It's all continuing to layer the lens through which we see and engage the world. And all of that formation we carry with us as persons--not just as ministers, as persons into whatever we do--but as ministers in particular, all of that reading, even if we're not calling on it, even if we don't know how it's necessarily impacting what we're doing when we've been called to a bedside, when we go on a visit, when we're sitting at the computer to write a sermon, it's in there. It's in what Fred Craddock calls the reservoir. And that's all part of a formative aspect of reading that far too few of us appreciate the significance of.

Eddie Rester 12:35

You know, think about the days of COVID, and one of the strange things that happened to me during COVID was that I couldn't... I stopped reading. I absolutely stopped reading. And there were a couple of articles that came out about a year in about, you know, people's ability to pay attention long term had declined. For me, I'd never read "Lonesome Dove," and so I committed to reading "Lonesome Dove," which is one of the most spectacular books ever. And then a guy named Jason Vickers posted something online about his son reading it, and then here's who was going to die next, and I was very furious with him.

Eddie Rester 13:17

But that was a way back in for me. How would, for somebody who says, "I've only read," maybe a preacher says, "I've only read to write sermons for the last 10 years," or a congregation member or just somebody listening to podcast who's like, yeah, I haven't read a book since college really. How would you encourage them to step back and begin to build that reservoir?

Austin Carty 13:43

Yeah, that's one of the most significant questions for a conversation like this. Because like any habit that we're trying to form, it's very difficult once you have not been in the habit. And I start there, but then I would add on to that, think of it more as a spiritual discipline, not as a habit. You know, at the core of my book are two theses, really. The whole book turns on two theses. The first is that reading is far more formational than it is informational. And the second, if you accept that and then think that sounds right, is we then need to, particularly as ministers, stop thinking of reading as a luxury and thinking of it as a vocation of responsibility.

Austin Carty 14:28

Because if it is, indeed, that formational, then it's going to have positive and meaningful impacts on every sphere of our ministry. And so I mentioned that now in the context of the question you just asked, because if we do see it that way, then it gives us permission to try to carve out time on our calendar each day. It doesn't have to be a lot of time. It can even be as few as 30 minutes, though I recommend trying to carve out an hour. Put it in the calendar, you know, as Eugene Peterson says in one of his books you know, the calendar is the document in our culture that sacrosanct. You know, if you say that, you know, my calendar is full, then you know that's authoritative. Carve out an hour. He used to carve out time and he put in there "meeting with FD"--Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Austin Carty 15:19

And so carve out time in the calendar. It doesn't have to be an hour. I recommend an hour, but even carve out 30 minutes. And trust, at least try to trust that you're reading by faith and not by sight so to speak with this formative piece, and pick out something that you'd find yourself drawn to. You don't have to start with a Dostoyevsky novel. In fact, I'd recommend don't start with Dostoevsky.

Eddie Rester 15:42
No, I would say don't start there.

Austin Carty 15:44

Because it's just like any other habit, that if you try to go full bore right out of the gate, you're probably just gonna get discouraged and quit right away. But if you start with something that you find yourself drawn to, and you start with a small enough time increment, but then you think of it as a discipline, and try to steady that discipline over time, then you'll build up. And so I have books that you know, a lot of times people will ask me to recommend where to start, which I'm happy to do and can do. But another part of this to me, is that just because a book has been meaningful for me, or I've found has borne fruit in my own ministry, it doesn't mean that it will be the same for anybody else.

Austin Carty 16:27

I kind of call it my pneumatology of reading. I think that books find us when they need to find us. There are so many books that I count among favorite books that it took me five different tries to actually get into. But the time I finally did, it was just magic. So I can recommend books, but more significantly is recommending that if the argument rings true that reading is more formational than informational, and therefore it ought to be thought of as a vocation and responsibility and not just a luxury, then carve out 30 minutes to an hour and give it a try. And don't just stop because a week in, you haven't found utilitarian value. That's the other part that's really, really difficult for us as ministers with this case that I'm making.

Chris McAlilly 17:22

Yeah. Is it true that... I don't think... I mean, we can dump on ministers all day long. It's easy to do that. I think it's possible that that problem, like reading for information, it's a broader problem within the context of the way Americans think about education. You know, I mean, I'm not making a novel point that, you know, we think about education in instrumental ways. It's, you know, why do you go to school? You go to school to get a job.

Eddie Rester 17:54 It's very utiliatrian.

Chris McAlilly 17:54

or to have a career. It's very much instrumentalized. And I think, you know, I mean, the humanities, you know, reading for a broader purpose is not there. I think the thing in reading your book that I was... I think I have a better understanding of why we started this podcast, that was one of the things I was thinking about, because we called the thing The Weight, and in part, Eddie, you know, it was this desire that we had that we wanted to talk about topics that we couldn't talk about in the context of preaching.

Chris McAlilly 18:30

But, you know, I think one of the things that you do is you kind of draw out this idea of weightiness in a way that I found really, really helpful in thinking about what it is we're trying to do. Because what reading does at its best is the same thing that, you know, really good conversation does, with multiple conversation partners, some of whom you don't don't agree with, is that it makes you more attuned in ways that, you know, you could call wise. There's a kind of wisdom that comes through really good conversation. There's a kind of wisdom that you can cultivate through reading. And there's one quotation you bring out from Craig Barnes, who I think he's still the president of Princeton, maybe he's transitioned out of that role, about the cultivation of wisdom as the development of gravitas, forming a soul with enough weightiness to be attractive, like all things with gravitational pull. And I wonder if you could just speak to that a little bit, just reading as the cultivation of wisdom and Eddie Rester gravitas.

Austin Carty 19:39

I love that you keyed in on that Craig Barnes quote. That is something that when I first read it, it just resonated and has stuck with me through the years in such a deep and profound way. And I think the way that you just framed the question is all completely right. That it's not as if one can't have gravitas, the way that Barnes describes it, if he or she is not a reader. Obviously, that's not the case. But reading is certainly among the chief disciplines that one can have to try to kind of consciously cultivate a sense of gravitas. Because everything that we're reading, particularly if we're reading it with an open and charitable spirit--in other words, that we're not reading things, so as to be disagreeable with and to dog it, and to figure out how we can kind of criticize it and poke holes in it, which is something that, you know, culturally, we're so pressured to do--but to read all things with a kind of charitable spirit, then we're constantly layering and then overlaying and then over layering, again, our understanding of the complexities and nuances of reality. And that has to then shape the person who's undergoing all of that layering.

Austin Carty 21:04

And so part of what I think gives such a weightiness to the conversations--and I love that y'all call it The Weight, and it's one of the things I love about listening to y'all, because I think you'll draw that out--is, then it's not only the things that your interlocutor is saying, but it's their very person. You know, that's what Barnes is getting at. He calls it, the holy joy of the soul, you know, and that it has this gravitas, this gravitational pull. And it's the person before it's the things that the person saying, because there's then a resonance and a match... being said, with the person who sang it, even if you don't necessarily agree with them on what you're talking about. And reading is a way to kind of consciously cultivate that.

Austin Carty 21:58

And I do just want to add, too, that I agree with you wholeheartedly, that it's certainly not just limited to ministry. We live in a transactional culture, where all the pressures are on show us what is the instrumental value of this input. And in my book, it's really only the second part-- there are three parts in the book, it's really only the second part that maps directly on to ministry, the rest of it really is applicable to everyone no matter what your vocation is, it's just about reading and what it does to the human person.

Austin Carty 22:35

But as ministers, you know, I think that there is a sense that we can't take time or the luxury of reading, and we then think of it in that term, as luxury instead of a responsibility, like I was saying, but because if we do dedicate, you know, 12 hours to reading that 350 page novel, then I've spent 12 hours, but then what do I have to show for it? It hasn't come out in the sermon. I haven't talked about it anywhere. Certainly, how do I justify having done that in my office? There's this pressure, even if we don't realize how much it's pressing down on us, that if we're taking the time to discipline ourselves to do this, we feel like it ought to be bearing fruit in our ministry, and so when you'd asked about getting folks started, that's why I say don't get disappointed if you take the time to do that for a couple of weeks, and you read something, but then it doesn't feel like you can then draw a straight line from reading that book to something you're doing. Because it's all about building up that reservoir, like Craddock said. But then to expand that, yes, it's far more than just for ministers. That's true for folks of all vocations.

Eddie Rester 23:53

And one of the things I really appreciate it and--by the way, Craig Barnes he wrote a book years ago called "Yearning." I'm doing a an advertisement for him. I'm just gonna do this right here. "Yearning," it's for people who have suffered. And it's an incredible book, if you can still find it. It was printed in the 90s. I still go back to this and read this book over and over.

Eddie Rester 24:15

One of the things that you, I want to get back to you, though, you say read fiction. You really push folks to read fiction, and which, again, pushes against that utilitarian thread that we all have, which is you should be reading something for work. You should be reading how TED talks are effective so that you can give better sermons. You should be reading the book about nuns so you can speak adequately to how to reach the nuns in our culture today. But you say, nope. Read fiction. Why?

Austin Carty 24:48

Well, yes. And that's why I say earlier so much of this depends on trust and reading by faith and not by sight, because you really do I have to trust that this formation is taking place in qualitative ways that that will bear fruit in time. We know not how. And I say read more fiction, one because data show that ministers, on average, buy more books in a given year than the average layperson but buy fewer works of fiction than the average layperson and book buyer. And I find that to be problematic, because there's a line that James K.A. Smith uses that I think gets it this way, he talks about being formed at subterranean levels. And that's what fiction does.

Austin Carty 25:46

Fiction forms us at a deeper level, in ways we don't know how we're being formed, whereas nonfiction is informing us--and it's forming us, too, but we kind of know what we're taking away as we're grappling with the work of nonfiction. When we're in story, we are being formed and we're coming to deeper levels of knowing, deeper appreciation and grasp of the complexity of human relationship, and of reality, and all of that, but it's happening at this level, that, again, as James K.A. Smith says, is subterranean. But it's ultimately deeper and more abiding.

Austin Carty 26:28

So when we encounter all these different characters in fiction, we then own that kind of growth in a way that goes with us everywhere. And so we've been shaped by that to where we might go on a pastoral visit, and not know to what degree the way that we kind of intuitively knew how to engage with the person we were visiting was in some way shaped by that novel or those novels that we read, you know, five, seven years ago. Something that stuck with us, that formed us, just as much as if not far more than something we might share with somebody about something that we've read, like, oh, you know, "I read this thing," and explain it to them.

Austin Carty 27:14

And then to kind of connect that back to your recommendation of the Barnes book, which I'm happy for us to talk about Craig Barnes for the rest of this time, because I love everything that he's written and think very highly. But you know, so far as I know, the last book that he published was a book "Diary of a Pastor's Soul," which is kind of a semi-autobiographical novel. And, as best as I understand it, he wrote this from a fictional standpoint, for the very reason that I've just described, that certainly wants to convey wisdom, hard won in a life of ministry, but knows that that can have kind of deeper impact, deeper resonance, and stay with the reader far longer if it's kind of wrapped in the garb of fiction, rather than just presented as you know, a nonfiction treatise on what one might gain from a life in ministry.

Chris McAlilly 28:15

One of my favorite and most kind of interesting chapters, just reading as a practitioner of ministry, and somebody who loves fiction, but have never really put the two together, was the chapter on pastoral care, reading for pastoral care. And I've read Eugene Peterson, but I'd never read "Subversive Spirituality." So there's a section here, where you talk about James Joyce's "Ulysses," and you put that in conversation with pastoral care. I could just read these two pages, or maybe you could talk about it. I was floored by this. I just thought it was amazing. Would you mind just kind of, for folks who haven't read the book yet, talk through kind of what you're doing there?

Austin Carty 29:04

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, you know, among the people who have most marked me as a minister, Eugene Peterson's at the very top. You know, in the book, I referred to him as the pastor reader par excellence. And he talks about how pastoral care to him had always been kind of a mundane function that a pastor has to do. And it's not so much that he didn't like it as that he didn't really find and derive a whole lot of joy from it. But the thing that kind of awoke him to the power and the beauty and the significance of pastoral care was not necessarily a conversation with someone on a pastoral visit, but was reading James Joyce's "Ulysses." That as he read this account of this otherwise completely mundane, insignificant person's life, but kind of just the way that the experience of that day is just compounded with each passing page. You realize that all these seemingly unmeaningful, insignificant events are actually bubbling up to and growing at compound interest into this really rich and meaningful window into the complexity and mystery of a human person.

Austin Carty 30:24

And so I use his kind of example of that to say that that's then kind of been my experience as a pastoral caregiver myself that I, kind of in following Peterson's recommendation, have come to view going on pastoral visits, as similar to the way that I view picking up a novel and entering the world of story. That every time we are sitting down with someone on a pastoral care visit, we're being invited into their life story. And if we will be humble and quiet and discerning, we'll begin to be invited far enough in that we can begin to connect some dots and begin to understand some overarching narrative threads. And suddenly, we become more aware that we're not just on this function of pastoral care so we can cross it off the list--got that done today, got my prayer in with them, hope it was meaningful.

Austin Carty 31:25

But instead, we suddenly sit back in a sense of wonder at really the kind of powerful change that's happening when two human beings are sitting down and sharing their life story with one another. And then that we as pastors get this amazing opportunity to basically be discerning readers and interpreters of their stories, and getting the gift if we're trusted enough. And then help them kind of take what probably for many people are just in their mind incoherent vignettes, and start to help them realize how there actually is a narrative thread weaving its way through all of that. And if we can help hear people into story, what a gift to be able to give to folks as pastoral caregivers. And we learn how to do that in many ways, not only from going and being with folks, so that is, of course true, but through sitting down and reading fiction.

Chris McAlilly 32:23

Yeah, "The pastor's work," Peterson says, "is to look at each person in one's parish with the same imagination, insight, and comprehensiveness with which James Joyce looked at the lead character of 'Ulysses,' Leopold Bloom." That's excellent. And then one other quotation in this part of the book, "I no longer consider these duties pastoral care, but occasions of original research on the stories being shaped in people's lives by the living Christ. Stories in which I sometimes get to put a sentence." Yes, yes. Like I read that I just like...

Austin Carty 33:04 That was gorgeous.

Chris McAlilly 33:05
Woohoo. I wanted... It was like I watched somebody hit a homerun. I just cheered, like, when I read that, I was like, "Yes!" It was awesome.

Eddie Rester 33:14
When Ole Miss won National Championship game, when we did the back to back to back home

runs. Chris, that's what you're referring to?

Chris McAlilly 33:19
I feel like if you use that third episode, I get $20 from you.

Austin Carty 33:26

Yeah. And to clarify, when I affirm with you and say, isn't that gorgeous, so the listeners hear that was the quote of Eugene Peterson. He wasn't quoting my own sentence. And then I talk about how gorgeous it was. Just to be clear for all those listeners.

Eddie Rester 33:43

That's what I like to do after I preach a good sermon. I like to you know, just really throw it out there. "Man, that was, yeah."

Chris McAlilly 33:50
It's really embarrassing, Austin, when Eddie does that, but you know.

Eddie Rester 33:55

Yeah. So I've got a question for both of you. Is there a book that you go back to and you read over and over again. It's a book that you think... And it can be anything. It can be a Eugene Peterson, or is there a book that you think when I don't have anything to read, I'm going back to pull that one off the shelf?

Austin Carty 34:22

I love that question, and I can't wait to hear your answers to it, too. That's the thing about book lovers. You can't possibly ever ask enough questions about favorite books. Yes. For me, the first one that comes to mind is the novel "Gilead." I open the book talking about the way that "Gilead" was formative for me in ways that I didn't know at the time and didn't realize until 15 years later, was so formative for me. But it's one of those books that invites me in each time, that I can't exhaust the riches that I take from that book.

Austin Carty 35:03

"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" is another one of those. For me, that's the book that made me fall in love with reading as a kid. Many of CS Lewis's books are that way. You know, I've probably read more Lewis over the course of my life than anybody. So there are a lot of Lewis books that, you know, I'll pick back up every now and again, just to kind of reacquaint myself with why they were significant to me in the past. And then I would say "The Brothers Karamazov," and that's not one that I always go back to and read cover to cover. In fact, I don't know that I've set to reading it cover to cover, ever done a full cover to cover read of it again. But it's one that I will pick up and read sections of.

Austin Carty 35:54

Because one of the things I'll say for folks that are, you know, interested in doing a little bit more reading and maybe even have kind of quietly been thinking, you know, I really haven't done a lot of the classics since high school and college. There's something about that feels like it's calling me. A Dostoevsky novel, and this is true of a lot of novelists, but for me, Dostoyevsky is kind of the high mark. There's really not a page of that novel in particular, where you're not being invited into an insight into human nature that is so profound, that you don't have to read the rest of the book, that you can just realize, wow, you know,that rings, so true, but I've never quite thought of it that way. So that's one that I pick up and just will open up. And sometimes I'll seek it out for specific chapters and passages. Other times, I'll just pick it up and read in it, because it's that rich.

Chris McAlilly 36:56

I don't re-read fiction, all that often. So, you know, I kind of jump around like a labrador puppy in the direction of new things. But I come back to certain nonfiction books over and over again. And within the context of a conversation about these things, and about the practice of ministry, the one that I come back to is just Eugene Peterson's book, "The Pastor." Reading that is grounding, it's anchoring. And it kind of reminds me of why I got into this, you know, in the first place. That's the one that comes to mind.

Chris McAlilly 37:34

And then I guess the other... I read, you know, reading an entire novel again is not something I do very often, but I will read poems over and over and over and over again. And probably, the poetry of a guy named Charles Wright has been important to me. He's from Pickwick, Tennessee, and he's somebody that I've read over and over. And then I've, you know, I pick up kind of Sabbath poems from Wendell Berry over and over and over again.

Austin Carty 38:09

Yeah, we'd be, I'd be remiss to let the podcast end in a little bit by not mentioning Wendell Berry, so I'm glad you just mentioned them. Because I think that readers in general, pastors in particular, can do no better than kind of slowly engage the Port William membership, and so the poetry, the nonfiction, all of those things, but in terms of kind of that slow, subterranean formation that fiction can do so well, there are few better examples than those Wendell Berry novels and short stories about the Port William membership.

Chris McAlilly 38:50 What about you, Eddie?

Eddie Rester 38:52

Thinking of it, y'all are so much deeper than I am. I love to read pop fiction and so, "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline, I pull that off the shelf, you know, at least once a year, because it's fun, and it's funny, and I've read it, I think originally at a time when things were real dark, and I was tired and it was just such a fun book to read. I'm a big CS Lewis fan. I read "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," all those when I was a child and continue to come back to them. "The Boys in the Boat," which is a memoir, kind of historical book. I love that one a lot.

Eddie Rester 39:37

Chris, what about you?

And then someone who's a member in Oxford at the church where Chris is, Aimee

And then someone who's a member in Oxford at the church where Chris is, Aimee Nezhukumatathil's little book "World of wonders," after you read it all the way through, it's one of those you can just go back to and just pull a chapter. And so it's a real easily accessible book for me. You know, the reason I asked that is I think sometimes people think, well, I read that when I was in high school orI read that when I was in junior high or as a kid, and I can't go back to it, but maybe as a way to get back into reading, go pull something you love.

Chris McAlilly 40:15 That's a good idea. I like that.

Austin Carty 40:18

Yeah. And to connect some of these threads, to pull Lewis back into the conversation, you know, you can't step into the same river twice, you know, but the gift is that your experience with that book you love, while it's not going to be the same, it's going to be likely meaningful in a different way, you know. And Lewis has that great line in "The Weight of Glory," I guess that was technically a sermon. But where he says, you know, if we trust in the things themselves will always be let down. If we go back to the mountain view vista that we experienced this rapturous moment in, if we go pick back up a book that we had this huge, powerful, profound encounter with, if we listen to some piece of music that had moved us in such a deep way. He says, you know, if we go back, anticipating that looking at that same vista view, or reading that same book, or listening to that same music is going to move us in that same way, he says we're always going to be let down, because the thing was not the thing itself. It was what came through them, you know.

Austin Carty 41:22

So it's important when we go back to some of these books that have been meaningful, that we're going back, we're not going to experience it in the same way. But we're likely going to have an altogether different experience with it that's only going to enrich that original one. I've had that happen countless times.

Chris McAlilly 41:41
I think that's a good word. And probably a good one to end on. Eddie, what do you think?

Eddie Rester 41:46

Fantastic. Austin, thank you for spending some time with us. I'd love to just start exchanging in some more book titles and things, but the book is "The Pastor's Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry." As you mentioned, the first half of the book really is about the power, what reading does to the mind, I used a word I'm going to have to explain to Chris later, neuroplasticity, I'm going to--don't worry. I'll work with him on that. And then, but the second half, if you're a pastor, I hope it encourages you to pick up and read.

Austin Carty 42:20
I appreciate so much you guys having me on. What a joy. Let's stay in touch. Let's keep sharing

book recommendations.

Chris McAlilly 42:25
Yeah, that's right. You're a Baptist who can read so. So you're basically a Methodist, if it's, you know, if we're taking "A River Runs Through It" at its at its face.

Austin Carty 42:39

Listen, you're talking my language with "A River Runs Through It". That's my favorite movie. And I love that novella. And I could talk about that for another hour. Maybe that's another podcast.

Eddie Rester 42:48
And one of the few times I've watched a movie and said I gotta go read the book. You know, anyway, instead of the other way around.

Austin Carty 42:54 It's just exquisite.

Chris McAlilly 42:56
Thanks so much, Austin. We loved it. It was great. A lot of fun.

Austin Carty 43:00
Thank y'all. Have a great day.

Eddie Rester 43:01
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.

Chris McAlilly 43:09

If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]