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On My Shelf: Life and Books with Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers.
I asked Sarah Irving-Stonebraker—associate professor of history and Western civilization at the Australian Catholic University and author of several books, including Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age—about what’s on her bedside table, her favorite fiction, the books she regularly revisits, and more.
What’s on your nightstand right now?
My Bible (ESV) and my Book of Common Prayer are always on my nightstand (which we call a “bedside table” in Australia!), and they travel with me. I find that the Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer are helpful rhythms to structure my day and keep me grounded in the historic Christian faith. The prayers of the prayer book have been very helpful in the growth of my own faith.
I also think that when we speak to new converts to Christianity we sometimes do not give them a sense of what the rhythms and practices of the Christian life might look like, and what it means for one’s prayer life that we are adopted into a historical people. The Daily Office provides a way to follow Jesus, to be connected to the rich traditions of the Christian faith, and to be formed and strengthened in the faith. I am aware that some people may be wary of “set prayers,” but I actually find great joy in praying for God’s help to put my heart into the prayers of the prayer book so that I can be formed and shaped by the faith of those who have gone before me. The Book of Common Prayer has also been a great comfort for me in the times of life where sorrow or heartache have left me searching for the words to pray.
The Book of Common Prayer has been a great comfort for me in the times of life where sorrow or heartache have left me searching for the words to pray.
I am also reading Peter Harrison’s Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age and Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning in my spare time, so they are on the nightstand too! Harrison’s book is in many ways his magnum opus, and he does a wonderful job exploring how it is, historically, that we came to categorize the world into the “natural” and the “supernatural.” Biggar’s book is a fascinating look at colonialism and underscores the moral complexity that much of history provides us with.
What are your favorite fiction books?
I tend to read much more nonfiction, but perhaps unsurprisingly for a historian, my favorite fiction books date from earlier centuries. About a year ago I read George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and it has become my favorite work of fiction to think and talk about, and in many ways I think it rivals Eliot’s much more famous Middlemarch as one of the greatest novels.
One of my favorite things to do at the moment is read aloud to our three children, and some of my favorite fiction books and series of books are those I’ve read aloud to them. I absolutely love the Specky Magee series, which is about a teenage boy who plays “Aussie Rules” football in Melbourne, Australia. There are some beautiful vignettes of family, male friendship, father-son relationships, and a very Australian childhood. They are a lot of fun to read.
Other fiction books I love (and read aloud to the children) include The Children of the New Forest, which is set back during the 17th-century English Civil War, and the Anne of Green Gables series (especially Anne of the Island and Anne’s House of Dreams).
What biographies or autobiographies have most influenced you and why?
One of the most formative literary experiences for me was reading and studying Robert Lowell’s autobiographical poem sequence Life Studies as a teenager in high school. Somehow Lowell managed to explore that which is so precious and particular to human life (the specific memories of childhood, the stories of generations of family) yet resist sentimentality.
I think there was something that appealed to me, the young historian, about how Lowell reflected upon his life (and the life of his family) in the context of American history. Many of the poems explore a moment in Lowell’s own life or the life of his family and yet are simultaneously a vignette of a moment in the much larger story of American history—from the Winslow-Starks of the Mayflower, to Lowell’s conscientious objection to serving during WWII, to his mental collapse during the “tranquilized fifties.” There was something about the great drama of history juxtaposed against Lowell’s individual experience, in all its intimate vulnerability, which I found moving.
I still get a lump in my throat reciting lines from “Skunk Hour,” imagining Lowell’s pain. Now that I am a Christian (and knowing Lowell was not), I hear a particular desperation in Lowell’s cry: “I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody’s here.”
What are some books you regularly reread and why?
Most often it is actually poetry that I reread, strangely enough. I will read T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets aloud quite often because the experience is so deeply moving. There truly is a transcendent grounding for beauty! Reading “Little Gidding” aloud, for example, moves me to praise the transcendent God, the author of all beauty.
I often reread C. S. Lewis’s books, especially Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce. Lewis was instrumental in my journey to faith in Jesus, and these two books in particular engaged my reason and my imagination, my mind and my heart.
For my work I always reread the texts I teach. This week and next week it is Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Advancement of Learning, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s Political Writings, and John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration.
What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others for the sake of the gospel?
Most recently, I have been struck by the way that the stories of Christians through history have inspired and encouraged me. I recently read Rachel Ciano and Ian Maddock’s set of books Ten Dead Gals You Should Know and Ten Dead Guys You Should Know. Those stories reminded me of just how different the cultures we are called to serve in are and also of the incredible courage of Christians through the centuries.
The story of missionary Gladys Aylward, for example, trekking across China with hundreds of small children in tow, in the midst of Japanese occupation, is just remarkable. I often find myself thinking about her, or about some of the other Christians, and remembering that I am actually surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses through the centuries.
What are the books on history, the craft of history, or history writing that have most indelibly shaped you?
As a PhD student at Cambridge University, I was shaped in many ways by the work of Quentin Skinner, the intellectual historian whose famous essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (now republished in a book of Skinner’s essays) helped shape how I read historical texts as an intellectual historian.
As an undergraduate history major and PhD student, I read Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump. That book helped me think through what was involved in writing the history of 17th-century “science” in the context of larger political questions of the time.
Many of the formative works about history were those that introduced me to different schools of historical writing—different ways of doing history. Some were examples of different approaches to history, like E. P. Thompson’s social history The Making of the English Working Class. Most memorable for me as an undergraduate was Robert Darnton’s famous essay in cultural history, “The Great Cat Massacre.” It had my undergraduate class aghast at just how strange and foreign the past (“another country”) can be.
What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve given or received?
When working through ideas, I try to speak my argument aloud to process the ideas and articulate them more clearly. When I do that, I am explaining them and communicating them to others (even an imagined audience!), and this clarifies my thoughts and forces me to be succinct. I think that we are generally better at explaining things concisely and clearly when speaking than when writing (where we can overcomplicate the argument).
What’s one book you wish every pastor would read?
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction together with The Pastor, both by Eugene Peterson. I think that pastors in our cultural moment would benefit from Peterson’s call to personal discipleship and faithful honesty in pastoral work. My family and I do not need gimmicks or the next great strategy to grow a church imported from the business world, but we do need humble leadership always calling us and challenging us to follow Jesus; we need pastors.
What are you learning about life and following Jesus?
Lately, I have been made aware of all the unseen ways that people serve. I learned recently about women serving in a few different ministries to Muslim women in south-western Sydney; they teach them to drive, they teach them to read English, and so forth. As one of my mentors put it, this very slow work is often unglamorous and unrecognized by others.
By contrast, my own calling as a university professor has—for reasons only the Lord knows—placed me in a very public position, even though I am a deeply private person. This has made me reflect on the different ways God places his people with different gifts and responsibilities, working together to build up the body of Christ.
On Sundays at our church (which is a church plant), I feel so much joy being part of this tiny band of people doing so many different things during the week and yet working together. It makes me see not only the truth of how God “equip[s] the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12) but also that what Peter says is so true of who we are now: “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people” (1 Pet. 2:10).
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