Preface:
How This Book Came to Be
The idea for Soul Food came from my wife, Sarah. Therefore, while I am responsible for the contents, Sarah may be praised (or blamed) for its existence. Beginning in 2006, I have written hundreds of short devotions which appeared in The Fruit of the Vine, a quarterly journal published by Barclay Press of Newberg, Oregon. Quakers across the country read The Fruit of the Vine; my annual work to produce two or three weeks of devotions has undoubtedly reached many more readers than all my philosophy books combined. Sarah suggested that I collect my contributions to The Fruit of the Vine into a year-long devotional reader.
Eric Muhr, who manages Barclay Press, agreed immediately when I asked permission to reprint my devotions. But when I sat down to organize the devotions (conveniently stored in my Mac-Mini—thank God for computer hard drives!), I came up considerably short of 365. Even adding three weeks of “Before Kings” and three weeks in Luke (both written in 2022), I didn’t have a full year. I decided to supplement the devotional readings with essays. Interspersed among the devotions, Soul Food includes some of my thinking over two decades on a variety of topics, both serious and whimsical: politics, the virtue of hope, movies, the future of work, driverless cars, zombies, etc.
Mixing essays with devotional readings might strike some readers like mixing oil and water. But the various bits come together, I think, because my goal is to think as a Christian. Hence, the subtitle: A Year of Christian Reflection. Philosophy, I have often told students at the beginning of a semester, consists in thinking; specifically, thinking hard about things that count. Then I ask the students, given that definition, which topics philosophers ought to think about. Religion? Yes, they say. Religion is important; it “counts.” Science? Yes. Art? Yes. And so on. I submit that every topic in these essays—even zombies—turns out to be important. God calls Christians to think carefully and critically about a wide variety of things.
There are scores, perhaps hundreds, of year-long devotional readers published every year. It’s a crowded market, if you want to think of it that way, and almost none of the authors will realize a profit. But why think of it that way? Sarah didn’t suggest the project to make money. She and I both hope that you, the reader, will find in these reflections on scripture (and the essays interspersed among them) encouragements to discipleship to Jesus.
