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From Poetry to the Trail of Tears | Matthew Mullins’ Summer Reading Recommendations

Matthew Mullins | June 16, 2021
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As summer begins, we want to help you craft the perfect Summer Reading List. We asked Southeastern Seminary professors what books they would recommend, and we’ll share their recommendations in coming weeks.

Today, Dr. Matthew Mullins recommends three books for your summer reading list.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
By Mary Oliver (Penguin Press, 201y)

Mullins: The selections in this volume bring readers back again and again to the two subjects on which Oliver reflected more than any others: nature and God. This book is for anyone interested in how the beauties and mysteries of the world leave us with questions beyond our ability to answer as humans.

Pushing the Bear
By Diane Glancy (Mariner Books, 1998)

Mullins: This novel reimagines the historical removal of the Cherokee Nation from their homeland via the infamous Trail of Tears, demonstrating how fiction has the capacity to help us understand events from which we are separated by space and time.

Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism
By Kathryn Tanner (Yale University Press, 2019)

Mullins: Tanner updates Max Weber’s influential The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) for the twenty-first century, when finance capitalism has replaced industrial capitalism throughout much of the world. Christianity, Tanner argues, offers alternatives to the ethics and everyday practices of finance capitalism.

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  • economics
  • history
  • Summer Reading List
Matthew Mullins

Matthew Mullins is Assistant Professor of English and History of Ideas at The College at Southeastern and the author of "Postmodernism in Pieces" (2016).

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