My wife and I have very different approaches to Christmas shopping.
• She spends January-October constantly on the lookout for thoughtful gifts at affordable prices, adding them to a storage bin hidden in our bedroom. When she took it out this past weekend (with our kids away at a church retreat), it was filled to the brim with presents of varying sizes.
• I, on the other hand, pay absolutely no attention to this holiday ritual until we’re weeks away from Christmas. Then I try to spend as little time as possible at or near a shopping mall, fight the temptation to buy a pile of gift cards and let recipients make the hard choices, and spend whatever it takes to order from Amazon whatever my children tell me they want most.
So bear that difference in approaches in mind as I renew my annual tradition of suggesting gifts that Pietist Schoolman readers may wish to give or receive. You’d probably do better to stop reading now and just get in touch with my wife, but I’ll do my level best to suggest gift ideas — mostly, but not only, books — that may appeal to my readers.
If you can’t attend my adult Sunday school talks but want to brush up on church history… Originally inspired by his Cold War experience smuggling minimal notes for adult classes past border control in communist Romania, Mark Noll’s Turning Points just entered its fourth edition. Its 2012 predecessor added two more recent events (Vatican II and the 1974 Lausanne Congress) to the original list of “decisive moments in the history of Christianity”; this edition adds two co-authors, David Komline and Han-luen Kantzer Komline, who helped Mark expand the book’s coverage of world Christianity, better incorporate the experiences of women, and add some new supplementary material.
If you share my dual interests in World War I and detective stories… You’d never guess that a mother-son writing team from North Carolina would so successfully recreate the world of England after World War I, but the team known as “Charles Todd” does all that and create a truly original character in the person of Ian Rutledge, a shellshocked WWI veteran who returns to his job as a Scotland Yard inspector in 1919… but is constantly in conversation with a voice belonging to the Scottish sergeant he was forced to execute for refusing an order to go “over the top.” To be honest, some of the novels ramble on longer than I prefer, but if you enjoy period detective stories in the mode of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, the two dozen books in the Rutledge series will be right up your alley.
If you can’t audit my January course on World War II… I don’t think I’ve recommended any WWII book to students more often than Richard Overy’s analysis of Why the Allies Won, so I’m looking forward to integrating themes from his latest work, Blood and Ruins, into my WWII course. While it may be hard to believe that there’s anything new to say about history’s bloodiest conflict, Overy’s reframing of “the last imperial war” (starting with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931) will help you to see the Second World War from a more global perspective.
If you’re as big a fan of The Anxious Bench as me… There’s never any shortage of good books coming out from the Christian historians populating my favorite group blog. Newer works from my erstwhile colleagues include João Chaves’ The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South: Southern Baptist Missionaries and the Shaping of Latin American Evangelicalism and Philip Jenkins’ history of the 91st Psalm, He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence.1 But actually, my main gift recommendation here is an older book: several years before The Making of Biblical Womanhood made her the rare medievalist to become a bestselling author, Beth Allison Barr examined The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England, now available in paperback.
If you tend to click on the politics links in my Saturday posts… Now that we’re through another election cycle, resist the temptation to start making 2024 predictions and instead look back into the history of American democracy with Wheaton College professor Tracy McKenzie. In We the Fallen People, Tracy “presents a close look at the ideas of human nature to be found in the history of American democratic thought, from the nation's Founders through the Jacksonian Era and Alexis de Tocqueville.”
If you like my Sunday Devotions series… When Christianity Today reviewed The Pietist Option five years ago, I was happy to get a positive write-up, but even happier to learn that the reviewer, Hannah Anderson, lives in the same part of Virginia as my parents. So let me return the favor and recommend Hannah’s Advent devotional, Heaven and Nature Sing. Drawing inspiration from her surroundings in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Hannah meditates “on the natural elements of the Christmas story…. Find your soul renewed and your heart restored, and discover once again why heaven and nature sing.”
Of course, there are other ways to read than via books… You’re already looking at one of them, but did you realize that you can purchase gift subscriptions to Substack newsletters? Just add “/gift” to the URL of any Substack newsletter — for example, those that I recommended last month, or this one — and you can get the reader in your life their own year-long paid subscription to some of the best writing on the Internet.
Or if you’d rather give an experience than an object… It’s been a hard two years for most nonprofit organizations in the arts and humanities, so consider giving a gift membership or pass to your favorite local historical society, museum, gallery, or theater.
Philip’s book actually drops two days after Christmas, but you can preorder now.