The Turner Library

Five years ago, I received an unexpected message from John Turner. We’d met about a decade earlier, but hadn’t seen each other since a Conference on Faith and History meeting in 2008. So when John emailed to ask if I’d take over for Tommy Kidd as the blogmeister and Tuesday contributor at The Anxious Bench, it was both a professional honor and a personal pleasure — a chance to work with John more consistently.

So I was sad to get another unexpected email from John last month, letting me know that he was ready to step away from The Anxious Bench after nine years of blogging. “That’s a long time to stay on any bench,” he prefaced his farewell post last week, “let alone an anxious one. But it’s been a wonderful resting place for me, because of the friends who have sat on it with me. I’m grateful to them and to Patheos for the liberty I’ve enjoyed to fill this space with what moves me.”

In turn, I’m grateful to John. A historian who has published as many good books as John has is under no obligation to help fill any blog’s space. But for nearly a decade John has done as much as any historian I know to help the reading public understand “the relevance of religious history for today.”

About half our Bench in 2016: from left, Kristin, David, Beth, John, and me. And, by the way, I really don’t think I’m a head taller than him… must be some kind of photographic illusion.

That’s “religious” writ large. A Presbyterian and evangelical who wrote critically about his own traditions, John also wrote empathetically and insightfully about everyone from the Latter-day Saints to the Pilgrims. (Not to mention Pietists!)

Even to the extent that John observed flaws and foibles in religion, he wrote irenically, gently, and (most notably) with humor. (“I greatly admire authors who try to be funny and succeed,” John told us in 2014. “Comedy is tough work.”) And at a time when “Americans are unusually good at hating each other,” his own work illustrates his conviction that “There is plenty of reason for hope and optimism. And nuance.”

Those words came from his recent review of journalist Kristy Nabhan-Warren’s book about a meatpacking plant in Iowa. Which brings me to my final and favorite aspect of John’s career at The Anxious Bench: his writing about reading.

Have I mentioned John’s astonishing record as a writer of books himself?

By my count, about a third of John’s 300+ posts for us have been either reviews or synopses of books or interviews with authors. In the process, he has done for our readers what he once said — with tongue in cheek, I think — such writing did for him: “First and foremost, [reviews] introduce me to books I will never read and help me pretend to be conversant with a wide range of publications. Second, they introduce me to books I actually want to read.”

That from John’s 2016 eulogy for Books & Culture, which he said “exemplified my ideal of evangelical intellectual discourse. Surprising. Bold. Ecumenical. Faithful.” All of which describes John’s own reading and reviewing.

As importantly, John’s reviews conveyed the joy of reading and learning. Even when he disagreed with an author’s method or conclusions, he found something to appreciate and admire. At all times, he modeled a commitment to lifelong learning — and facilitated it for others.

So while bibliography might seem like an odd mode for a tribute, let me conclude my statement of gratitude to John by compiling as many of his reviews and interviews as I could find in our archive (almost 100!), organized alphabetically rather than by category. (That seems the better way to convey the breadth and diversity of his interests.) If you wanted to extend your reading list and expand your mind this fall and winter, you could do a lot worse than to spend those months working your way through the links below.