It's been a good long while since I read something that really WOWed me. I read constantly, a pretty wide variety of material from diverse sources, though admittedly better than half my reading is theological.
Contemporary authors generally (and particularly contemporary Christian authors) bore me with their sentimentality and subjectivity, mired ever in the self and realm of personal experience. Those authors who manage to escape it often overshoot the mark into unnecessary complexity, intentional ambiguity and esoteric minutia.
I want an author to be personable and precise, sincere but not sentimental. I want an author to make me think and ask hard questions, but not leave them unanswered. I want to get a sense of the person behind the words, and yet know all the while that the words are compelling in themselves -- moreso than the person who wrote them: WHAT IS SAID matters more than who said it, and winds up mattering more to me than I expected.
Rarely does one find such a writer, who can do all this consistently.
Martin Luther was such a writer. I love reading his work as much from a literary standpoint as from a theological one. He's got an inimitable voice and style, a kind sorely lacking in Christendom today. He's the sort of author where I'm able to enjoy the way he says something as much as what he said.
Maybe the mark I look for is this: someone who loves language as much as the ideas, emotions, scenes and substance it conveys -- someone who shows a disciplined and devout proficiency for tongue, mind and ear.
Whether I myself measure up to my own standards as a writer, I know not. But now you know at least the sort of thing I regard as the lofty goals of the art, and the sort of persons who engage in the craft of writing which I admire.
Gene Edward Veith is such an author. His recent work, "The Spirituality of the Cross" has me utterly engaged. I barely finish a chapter of this little book and find myself flipping back to reread the chapter again and again. The CPH blurb will make you yawn a dreadful "Ho-ho-hum," but the book itself is the single most compelling piece of contemporary writing I've held in my hands in a decade.
