Blogs can be hazardous to intellectual and spiritual health, for you and me. (Can is the operative word.) Blogs can be helpful in small doses (from good sources, as some are not helpful at all and some are harmful), but we need to read books. It's easy to find ourselves spending way more time than we need to trying to read the latest thing this guy said, and this guy, and this guy. Let's not let ourselves be distracted in this way. I had a friend recently show me something helpful in guarding against poor stewardship of a time in this area: a chart to help him plan and record the reading of a variety of good things. Something like this would be a worthy thing for all of us to follow (written or unwritten), and my brother is not completely alone in trying to think about such things.
Much of the content in the links that follow is directed toward pastors, but there are things we all can learn from in this area. For me, I have found these articles to be helpful admonitions in devoting more of our reading time to reading books:
- Al Mohler: "Some Thoughts on the Reading of Books"
- Jason Button gives us Pastor Mark Minnick's thoughts in three installments:
- Tony Reinke on Mark Dever's reading schedule (canon of theologians)
- The Together for the Gospel blog featured some helpful articles about this:
- Dever on his canon of theologians here and (briefly) here
- Mohler on reading fiction and bad theology
- J. Ligon Duncan
- Tim Challies: "Ten Tips to Read More and Read Better"
