Happy Hour Books
An opportunity to discuss faith, life and theology while enjoying a beverage and some comradery.
The Happy Hour Book Group usually meets at 5pm once a month midweek at a time convenient to participants.
Our meeting place has been the Rose & Crown pub in Palo Alto or on the front patio at church (where it’s bring your own beverage to share). Contact Pastor Bernt for details.
Readings tend to be short and in-depth books or essays. Sometimes we don’t get a chance to finish the reading, but we come anyway to enjoy a meaningful conversation while sipping a favorite beverage.
Current reading, early 2026: The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse, by Miroslav Volf. A slim book that challenges deeply held values of seeking superiority to others in wealth, virtue, achievement, social media followers. Engages the Bible, John Milton and Soren Kierkegaard. What if instead of superiority, we focused on excellence? A few copies will be available at church ($19), or get your own.
Some of the authors and books we’ve read in the past:
- Nine Billion Turing Tests, on A.I. and the Silicon Valley future, by FLC member and writer Chris Willrich.
- Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, by Elizabeth Oldfield.
- Attention economy with Burkemann, Odell, Newport.
- Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
- Low Anthropology by David Zahl.
- When in Romans by Beverly Gaventa.
- On Christian Freedom and Commentary on the Magnificat by Martin Luther
- Who is God? and Jesus: A Very Short Introduction by Richard Bauckham
