Adam Shields

Summary: 45 Reflections on how the bible pushes us toward disquiet.

I am not a devotional guy. I rarely read devotionals and I even more rarely find them helpful. It is not that I am against them as a concept, but that they just don’t work well for me. I read too much and am too disorganized to find short devotional reading useful.

But every once in a while I try again. I have been occasionally using Disquiet Time as a devotional over the past three months. I have read a chapter two or three times a week most weeks before bed. This is one of the better devotional books I have read, in part because it is attempting to disquiet and not quiet.

The main focus of the book is to ask a WIDE variety of writers to reflect on what is disquieting about scripture. And the results are quite diverse and almost universally good. Amy Julia Becker (blogger at CT and author) talks about how we all cherry pick verses. Karen Swallow Prior (English Professor and author) writes about how our bibles tend to leave out or hide all of the sh*t in scripture. Caryn Rivadeneira (church staff and author) talks about the scandal of being made in God’s image.

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Summary: Inspector Gamache and his wife go away to their favorite vacation spot for their 35th anniversary, murder follows them.

This is my fourth Inspector Gamache book in as many weeks and the series seems to be getting better. Inspector Gamache and his wife traditionally go to a small quaint upscale wilderness inn for their anniversary. Again this year for their 35th, after a rough year, they are able to get away.

The only other guests at the inn are a wealthy extended family. The matriarch and second husband, the adult four children and corresponding spouses and one grandchild round out the guest list. Returning characters Peter Marrow, and his wife Clare, from Three Pines is one of those children. Peter, the third of the four and in his early 50s is still in many ways traumatized by his family as it seems are the rest of the family.

After several days, a statue of the children’s father is installed at the inn. The next morning the second child (the oldest daughter) is found crushed by the statue in the garden.

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Summary: A history and guide to early church theologians, pastors and writers.

I am sorry if you are not interested in Christian History, I think I am going to be reading a lot of it this year. The resurgence of awareness of the early Church Fathers, not only in the more traditional liturgical church settings but in the Evangelical world has given rise to a number of good books about early Church history and the actual writings of those early Christians.

After reading John Michael Talbot’s mostly memoir-ish look at the early Church fathers I decided that I wanted a more history oriented book, but still introduction level. I have read fairly in depth about the early Church Fathers on the trinity, but not on much else. (Although I have read several other than Christian history survey books that cover the era.)

When the Church Was Young fits the bill well. D’Ambrosia is Catholic and writing this in part to encourage Catholics, but this is not an exclusively Catholic view of the early church. After all, at this point it was just the Church, the major splits were yet to come, although there were certainly lots of little splits.  There were a few places where I think that D’Ambrosia made too much of a leap from ancient to current Catholic and I think he started referring to all Christians as Catholic earlier than the history warrants, but with those caveats, D’Ambrosia does a good job of giving context and history to the various Church Fathers and enough of a sense of their writing to feel like you are getting more than just survey history.

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Summary: Our current system of caring for the elderly and sick could be better.

Mortality is something that no one really likes to consider. However, Atul Gawande, a general surgeon and author of a number of books thinks we need to spend a lot more time thinking about it. (Notice the subtle, but brilliant blade of grass on the cover.)

Being Mortal is about our end of life health and care system. Because Gawande’s father is an immigrant from India, he opens the book talking about the difference between the older systems of family care (and what is still practiced in many parts of the world including India) and our Western independence focused system of care. While Gawande thinks there are many things to be said for being around family and multi-generational living, the reality is not always good. Those that do not have children have no system, the children’ may need to give up opportunities if it requires moving away, and regardless, the elderly themselves would often prefer to be on their own.

Prior to Social Security and Medicare, most elderly were in poverty and approximately 2/3 of the residents of poor houses (think Dickens) were elderly. Those poor houses were still operating in the US until being slowly shut down in the mid-20th century.

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