Get to know Eugene Peterson. He's been gaining fame lately due to Bono's praises, and it's time you meet him, if you haven't.
I've been a fan of his since my dad and I first discover the New Testament installment of his Bible paraphrase called The Message sometime in the early 90's. That paraphrase is now complete, and available in the whole Bible. I got a copy last year, and am nearly finished with the Old Testament. For some, The Message may take some getting used to, but I think it would be good for almost anyone (unless you're a scholar of the biblical languages) to have a copy to supplement his or her Bible reading/study.
(If you buy a copy, I encourage you to get one of the older versions without verse numbers. The chapters are still marked, but you don't have as many numbers encumbering your reading. This Bible is for reading, not for parceling out into small pieces.)
Recently, I've read the first two installments in a planned five book anthology on spiritual theology from Dr. Peterson: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, and Eat This Book.
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places gets its name from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. The significance is that Christ is active in all of reality: creation, history, and community. Peterson makes a brilliant case for the Christian life lived in the hum-drum and the nitty-gritty, where Jesus made himself known. Peterson warns his readers against gnosticism, moralism, and sectarianism, encouraging them to live fear-of-the-Lord through Sabbath and wonder, Eucharist and hospitality, Baptism and love.
I love this book on many levels, and in some ways Peterson speaks for me through it. It's not an easy read, but it is conversational in tone, and understandable at the non-scholarly level.
This quote shares some of the power of the book:
But what tops the agenda for me is the Christian life as lived, lived with this sense of congruence between who Christ is and who I am; lived at this busy, heavily trafficked North American intersection with the kingdom of God; Christ playing in my limbs and eyes.
Eat This Book is about the Bible: how to read it, basically. However, it's much deeper than that. Peterson challenges his readers to forsake all efforts at using the Scriptures for our own purposes, and instead to enter into the Scriptures, let the Scriptures enter into us, and let God be sovereign in His revealed word.
I won't go any further in this post, as it's already quite long. Here's a quote from Eat This Book:
I wanted to gather a company of people together who read personally, not impersonally, who learned to read the Bible in order to live their true selves, not just get information that they could use to raise their standard of living. I wanted to counter the consumer attitude that uses the Bible as a way to gather religious data by which we can be our own gods, and then replace it with an attitude primed to listen to to and obey God, to take us out of our preoccupations with ourselves into the spacious freedom in which God is working the world's salvation.
These books are well worth reading. They may even get inside you and change you, change your approach to God, to life, and to the Bible, change them it in a way that will lead you into deeper more active love, and richer more Christ-like character...
