Book Reviews

This is the one of the first books I read in 2011.  And it actually came out in 2010, but still I think it is a book that more people need to read.  The evangelical church needs to recover a sense of secular vocation and Culture Making presents that better than most that I have read.  Andy Crouch is one of the most innovated thinkers of the modern Evangelical world and his new project with Christianity Today on the City and the Church continues to show that.  You can see the roots of Culture Making in his current project.  Culture Making is currently on sale for $3.99 on kindle, so pick it up.

Takeaway: If you work in a creative field inside or outside the church and you have not read this book, you are doing yourself a disservice.

It is common for me to recommend books that I am currently reading.  After all they are in my head, I am thinking about them.  I think everyone else should be thinking about them so I can talk about the ideas that are in them.  But this is a book that I honestly think most Christian need to read.

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Takeaway: If you are going to respond to another author, it is best to deal with their actual arguments.

GK Beale opens the book with a fictional discussion between two Evangelicals.  This fictional discussion was one of the better parts of the book. It actually took both the conservative and more moderate evangelical students seriously.

Beale is directly responding to Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation.  I was interested in reading a good conservative response to Enns.  It is not that I think that Enns’ book was perfect, it was far from it.  But Beale’s problems with Enns’ book seem to rely less on the evidence that Enns’ presents than on the defense of what Beale views as an Evangelical view of inerrancy and the doctrine of scripture.

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This may be the most polarizing of the books I have on my 2011 Bookwi.se Books of the Year.  Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions is a provokative book about why men and women, both married and single, need more cross gender friendships, not less. My wife and I have lead small groups for newly married couples for the past couple years. Different expectations and histories with cross gender friendships comes up regularly. I am convinced that healthy cross-gender friendships can do much to strengthen marriages.  I have given away more copies of this than any other book this year. Even if you are skeptical about the concept I challenge you to read the book and give Brennan the chance to make the case.

Takeaway: The role of cross gender friendships is important.

I always tell people I find good books by listening to other readers. I spend a fair amount of time reading reviews and blogs by people that I have come to trust over time. One of those that I deeply respect is John Armstrong. He has a daily blog that has a fairly wide range of subjects. But most of them has something to do with his passion for Missional Ecumenicism (essentially drawing the church together). Right before Christmas he had a couple posts about this book.

Right off the bat, John laid out his hand. He started the book to find a problem with it. John actually wrote a book about sexual immorality among clergy because he was so concerned about the damage it was doing to the church. John used to and many other clergy still do to fall back to Billy Graham’s advice to never be seen alone with a woman that was not your wife. So pastors (primarily male) will not meet with woman without someone else present. They will drive separate cars to the same meeting so they do not have to be seen with someone of a different sex in the same car by themselves.

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Over the next 10 days Bookwi.se will be re-posting my books of the year. They are in alphabetical order by author. Matthew Lee Anderson has given the evangelical church a real gift with this book.  And like many gifts that are actually good for us, this book has not had the attention that it deserves.  The physical body should be important to us because it is important to God.  And ignoring the theology of the body is ignoring why God created us as physical human beings and came to earth himself as a physical human and was resurrected again with a physical body.  I hope this is the start of a new focus on the theology of the body in the Evangelical world.
Takeaway: This is one of the more important contributions to Evangelical Theology I have read in recent years. I very much look forward to expanded editions or new books by Anderson to supplement what he has here.

I finished this book up the first night of my vacation at the beach.  I am vacationing with my wife’s family, including my two nieces that I nanny.  The three year old came into the living room buck naked and asked where her pull-ups were.  She unashamedly turned around and stuck out her bottom to show us that she did not have a pull-up on and told us that she still wears pull-ups to bed because she is not big yet.

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Guest post by Chris Moore. He blogs at aboyandhisgod.blogspot.com and is on twitter

Takeaway: With creativity, a website, and a plan to make a difference, anybody can do something significant that makes the world a better place. This book is a good guide into how.

I have a lot of friends that want to start something that matters. From prison ministries to mentoring programs to churches to community. I think that most of us have this abstract idea of what should be. Great ideas. Sticky ideas. Ideas for the common good.

But simultaneously, most of us have trouble getting these ideas any more concrete than a few idealistic conversations. Fears of failure. Fears of bankruptcy. Fears of inadequacy.

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The List has been decided.  Starting tomorrow, I will re-post the reviews of the books that made the most impact on me this year.  These are not necessarily the books that I think are the best books of the year (although most of them would be), but instead these are the books that weeks or months after I finished them, I was still talking about and still recommending to others.  The list will not be in ranked order (I couldn’t figure out how to rank them), but alphabetical by Author.  After the jump are the 10 honorable mentions that were very close to making my list.

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Summary: The story of last battle of the 3rd Book of Twilight (Eclipse) told from one of the newborn vampires.

So I am going to out myself up front.  I read all of the original Twilight books.  They are some of the first books I read on the Kindle when I first purchased it.  And I enjoyed them.  Yes, I get some of the issues people have with them.  Yes I understand that they completely turn vampire lore upside down and made what has always been considered evil into good.  Yes, I get the issues of sexualizing teens and the problems of her desire to die rather than live without Edward.   I don’t completely disagree with those complaints, but I still enjoyed them.

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Takeaway: Spiritual friendship is important and undervalued.

I intentionally picked this up with CS Lewis‘ Letters to Malcolm (my review) because they seem to be complementary (and because I had a $10 credit on Audible and with my discount they came to $10.09 together).

But while Letters to Malcolm was very personal and revealing, this felt flat.  First it is written as an exercise in spiritual mentoring.  These are not actual letters compiled but instead are written to characterize the types of letters that Peterson often writes.  This gives it form and coherence, but it left the whole thing feeling contrived.

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Summary: A classic hero: a good guy that is a bit bad, but still sacrifices himself for the girl

I first heard about the Dresden Files books when they were optioned for a short lived TV show.  I enjoyed the show, although it was only a single season.  The first book in the series was made into an episode of the TV show.  So when I read the book, I had an idea of where it was going.

Fool Moon, was not part of the TV show (or at least I do not remember it.)  Dresden is the only openly practicing wizard in Chicago.  He doesn’t have much business and mostly survives off of being hired by the police force as a consultant on strange murders.  Lt Murphy (who is hinted at as a potential love interest) has stopped calling because she is under internal investigation because previous book.

When Murphy finally does call, it is because there have been a string of deaths from wolves, in Chicago, around full moons.  Eventually we find out there are several different types of were-wolves.  And some of the were-wolves are good and some not so good.

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Note: Christianity Today women’s Blog Her-meneutics, had a blog post about this book on Feb 1, 2012.  It seems that Reiss converted to Mormonism in 1993 and continues to be active in her Mormon church. While this does not change the overall review, I am a bit more wary of Paraclete Press, a small publishing house that I have enjoyed lately.  I feel this book was marketed inappropriately.
Takeaway: Sainthood is hard, and more focused on a life time than month long experiments.

At some point we are going to tire of these year-long experiment books.  There was Julie and Julia.  Then AJ Jacobs books on reading the Encyclopedia and Living Biblically.  Then the Christian knock-off by Edward Dobson and others.  When I typed in “Living + year” into the Amazon search bar I came up with 147 books, most of which are memoir-y looks at trying to do something for a year (live generously, live in the country, live green, live without running water, listen to Oprah, read the church fathers, live shamelessly, live like my grandmother, live straight, live dangerously, not lie, travel, eat locally, etc–these are all real by the way.)

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