Coming Soon: (More of) The Good Books

A renewed focus for a new era.

It’s been a long stretch since my last missive.

I published my last post a few days after the election results, and in the intervening time I’ve really tried to think about what perspectives I have to offer in this moment. And what I’ve been drawn toward for quite some time is a more explicit focus on books.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been slowly building out different verticals for this publication. If you head to the website, you’ll see different sections under The Post-Evangelical Post:

• ❌ Exvangelical (my long-running podcast)

• ⚖️ Powers & Principalities (my season of Christian nationalism-focused interviews from 2020)

• 📱Shaped by Tools, for my rare pontificating about technology & media

• 📚The Good Books, for author interviews.

So to that end, I’ll be expanding my focus on author interviews, book recommendations, and other book-related content, under the banner of The Good Books.

Ironically (to me at least), this means that I am finally forcing myself to both learn and publish more video content. I’m loath to film myself, but aside from the seeming rejuvenation of text-based social media on Bluesky, most folks are best reached through video. So yes, please follow me on YouTube and Instagram, if you’re on those platforms—and I’ll be posting things here, of course.

I know that reading alone will not “save” us.¹ But reading is how I make sense of the world and its history, and as I wrote in the introduction to Exvangelical & Beyond, “I use history in the same way journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones describes it: “History revealed the building blocks of the world I now inhabited, explaining how communities, institutions, relationships came to be…. It provided the key to decode all that I saw around me.”

Still from “Time Enough at Last” episode of The Twilight Zone.

I may love reading more than I love writing. Even when I am watching a show or movie or something online, it’s usually a turn of phrase moves me more than the visuals. And I have loved that my public work has connected me to authors willing to talk to me about their books.

Writing a book is not a flippant task: it takes dedication, and focus, and a helluva lot of work. I try to honor that work in each author interview I do, and I will do my utmost to carry that same posture into the rest of this work, too.

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PROMOTIONAL BREAK²

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This event is designed to bring forward intersectional topics that we don’t always see discussed in these spaces. We’ll have panel discussions, facilitated conversations, and even a livestream option for those who can’t make it in person. Our hope is to make this an annual gathering in various locations as we continue striving to build inclusive community.

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Don’t expect a deluge of content just yet—this is a holiday week, after all—and don’t expect me to completely ‘abandon’ my other areas of interest. Think of this as a more explicit expansion of my work.

As I wrote on Bluesky recently, part of me thought that my book would serve as a capstone to my work on the topics of evangelical Christianity, deconstruction, and all the myriad ways it influences personal and social life. But given where things are headed, I imagine I’ll be talking and writing about it for a long while still.

Still, the exvangelical counterpublic is robust now. People have a shared language to use to discuss their experiences in evangelicalism, and their experiences leaving it. They have sources for news and commentary like Straight White American Jesus. There are podcasts and Instagrammers and TikTokkers. There are books across multiple genres. It has its own momentum and is continuing to expand in a variety of directions.

If you’re a longtime reader (or you’ve read my book) you know that I think a lot about media environments—both about how they function as well as how they impact us. This piece from 2022 illustrates some of that thinking, and also has some of the seeds of what I would eventually write about in Exvangelical & Beyond:

📱Discourse Whiplash & Social Media

So this new endeavor is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I will continue to interview authors who write about religion & society, but I hope that I can expand my coverage to include other works of nonfiction, as well as other genres like science fiction and comics and graphic novels. I am also deeply curious about how we read and write—books like Reader, Come Home and Book Was There fascinate me—and may cover topics related to media literacy, “echo chambers,” and even things like ereaders and other technological aspects of reading today.³

I intend to start small. Later this week, I’ll share a Recommended Reading list of books that informed my own that will serve as a supplement to the index at the end of my book. That will be posted here and to my Bookshop storefront.

Later on, I may break out some of these things into its own podcast feed & YouTube playlist.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less of a poster and become a bit precious about what I publish. In this next phase I may have to shift back into that “learn in public” type of phase of learning new skills. Keep in mind, I do all this work in addition to my full-time job (I shared a little about that in the embeded Note below). If you want to help accelerate my output, you can support me directly by upgrading your subscription.

I’m excited to read more books, to speak to more authors, to try new things, and to explore them in conversation with you. Now it’s time to get back to the TBR pile.

1. I have no interest in being “saved,” either. Been there, done that.

2. No monetary compensation was received for this ad; promotion was exchanged for future exhibition space.

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