Editor’s Note: As a new year begins, many are still carrying questions left unsettled by the last one—questions of formation, fatigue, and hope. In this reflective article, Rev. David Doong looks back on five books that shaped his thinking over the past year. For ChinaSource readers and for Chinese Christians navigating a rapidly changing cultural and ecclesial landscape, this reflection offers more than a personal reading list. It offers a glimpse into how a pastor and leader within the global Chinese Christian community seeks to slow down, name the forces shaping discipleship today, and discern faithfulness amid anxiety and acceleration.
As 2025 draws to a close, I have just returned from my final overseas ministry trip of the year. After stepping off the plane, I took some time to look back over my reading from the past year.
Keeping a record is not about accumulating more, but about digesting and sorting through. Only when we attempt to rearticulate the insights of others do they truly become nourishment for our own thinking. What follows are the five books that left the deepest impression on me this year.
1. The Book I Was Most Reluctant to Finish
Art Is a Journey into the Light by Mako Fujimura
While reading this book, I found myself unwilling to rush through it. Each time, I read only a few pages, slowly savoring the text and returning to it again and again.
Mako Fujimura’s work is often associated with slow art. His paintings require viewers to slow down, to pause and look attentively in silence. In the same way, his writing invites readers into an unhurried rhythm of reading—one that resists efficiency and rewards patient attention.
Read more: 藝術、文化與新創造的神學想像/ Art, Culture, and the Theological Imagination of New Creation
2. The Most Disruptive and Provocative Read
The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han
Why is it that in an age that constantly encourages us to “love ourselves” and “be ourselves,” people seem increasingly incapable of loving others—or even of loving and being loved at all?
Byung-Chul Han incisively observes that a culture of narcissism does not lead to greater freedom. Instead, it traps people in endless cycles of self-reference and self-exhaustion. This book does more than offer cultural diagnosis; it provides a language that helps me more clearly identify many of the challenges facing discipleship and spiritual formation today. These struggles are often not merely personal but deeply embedded in a cultural structure in which eros itself has been depleted.
Read more: 自戀時代的門徒培育/ Discipleship in an Age of Narcissism
3. The Book with the Most Practical Wisdom
A Pilgrimage into Letting Go by Andrew and Kara Root
As a father, parenting is often a source of anxiety. As a pastor, shepherding others repeatedly forces me to confront my own limitations, inadequacies, and frustrations.
Rather than rushing to offer “better methods” or “more effective strategies,” Andrew and Kara Root bring readers back to a more fundamental question: Why are we so afraid of losing control? Their analysis does not simply soothe anxiety or disappointment. Instead, it exposes the deeper roots of our fear and points toward possible paths forward.
Read more: 失控時代的教養與牧養/ Parenting and Pastoring in an Age of Losing Control
4. The Most Surprising Work of Biblical Scholarship
The Emergence of Early Christianity: How the Christ-Event Changed the Greco-Roman World by Chang Kai-Hsien (張楷弦)
“The kingdom of God subverts the kingdoms of this world” is a theological phrase many of us know well. Yet how that subversion actually takes place often remains vague or even romanticized.
Through a careful reconstruction of the social, political, and cultural context of the New Testament world, Chang Kai-Hsien helps readers see afresh how the New Testament authors proclaimed a vision of God’s kingdom that stood in stark contrast to the Roman Empire. This kingdom imagination gave shape to a community ordered by a logic fundamentally different from that of empire.
Read more: 讀《天國崛起》的收穫/ Reflections on The Emergence of Early Christianity
5. My Favorite Theological Work
Theopolitical Imagination / The Politics of the Eucharist by William Cavanaugh
The Eucharist, a sacrament regularly practiced by Christians, is often reduced to an inward, individual spiritual exercise. Its communal, public, and even political dimensions are frequently overlooked.
With remarkably concise yet powerful argumentation, William Cavanaugh demonstrates that the Eucharist itself is a political practice. It does not merely commemorate Christ’s death and resurrection; it actively forms a people shaped by a story different from that of the modern nation-state and market economy—exposing and resisting the narratives modern societies so readily take for granted.
Read more: 聖餐與現代敘事的對抗/ The Eucharist and the Challenge to Modern Narratives
Closing Reflection
Taken together, these five books address different subjects, yet they converge on a shared and deeper question: in an age shaped by speed, control, self-fulfillment, and powerful narratives, how does the Christian faith continue to form a different way of seeing, loving, inhabiting the world, and living as a people? Whether through light entering the cracks of brokenness in art, the unmasking of narcissistic love, learning to let go amid loss of control, the reshaping of communal life by the Christ event, or the Eucharist as an alternative political imagination, none of these works rush toward quick solutions. Instead, they draw us back to a more fundamental practice—learning to look slowly, listen attentively, and discern patiently, making room for God’s work amid fragility and uncertainty. Perhaps genuine renewal does not begin with faster action, but with a way of reading—and living—that is no longer captive to the tempo of our time.
This article was originally written in Chinese and is presented here in an English translation edited by the ChinaSource team, with the author’s permission.
