Thank God for Friends that My Books Have Made

Early in my career I was at a session of the American Academy of Religion (if memory serves me right) devoted to a panel engagement of one of William J. Abraham’s (of Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University) recently published books (at that time, which title I no longer recall), when I heard him open his response with something along the following lines: “Books are like children; as they grow up, you never know what kinds of friends they are going to bring home.” I have repeated something like this in the years since, and its basic sentiment is gestured to also in the title of this response I am providing to the set of papers collected here. In the following, I want to both express my gratitude to these friends my books have made and do so by interacting with the thoughts they have expressed.