What I'm Reading

I have been reading, thinking, and writing about the Internet and its effects upon our identities, communities, polities, and discourses for nearly a copy of decades. In that time, I have encountered no book as perceptive on the subject as Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation , which I read at the beginning of the year. It is a timely book, meriting close and careful reading, with urgent insights concerning the most formative technologies and media of our day.

Not long ago I taught a course on the Bible and politics, which gave me occasion to revisit Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations , which I had set as a course text. For several years, I was an editor for a political theological journal’s website, focusing on Scripture and politics. Thinking carefully about Scripture as a source for political reflection while closely engaging with the writing of dozens of submissions from authors from a range of traditions, it was evident that Scripture more typically functioned as a reservoir of images, prooftexts, or resonant rhetoric to be exploited by political visions brought to the text, rather than as something that truly informed and shaped people’s politics. O’Donovan’s work is a rare instance where the biblical text is granted its proper place in a political imaginary. I never revisit it without great profit.

L. Michael Morales’s new Numbers commentary, in my judgment, may be his best work to date, at least from my reading of its first volume on Numbers 1-19. Any Theopolitan thinker will find rich seams of insight to mine within it and many points where positions that are familiar to readers of Jordan are developed and explored in stimulating and insightful ways. This is the best commentary I read in 2024.