My hands are dusty from packing up my office. I don’t know why that is. Where does the grit on these brown boxes come from? Most of what I’m packing is books. I pack the majority without thinking about them too much. They’ve been friends on the shelf; they will get along in a box for a few weeks. A few, though, find an intermediary resting place on my desk. I need companions for a little while longer.
A copy of Jim Reimer’s posthumous essays docks there because I owe a review of it to a Canadian journal. I’ll think it over when we drive through Reimer’s home province of Manitoba. I keep out Robert Louis Wilken’s book on patristic theology too. I love the church fathers for their ignorance, that is, their ignorance of the divide between practical and academic theology. I’ll need mentors in a few months. Buechner’s memoir of vocation also finds an open slip. The back cover says he was a Presbyterian minister. 
And then, I add a pair of books by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Life Together and Letters and Papers from Prison. I have the new blue and white volumes, with the footnotes about the footnotes.
[Read the rest of the essay on the Collegeville Institute website here. Check out the rest of their site while you’re there. It’s full of good stuff.]
Anthony G. Siegrist 